


Smoke & Mirrors

by FictionalFeather



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Has PTSD, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Memory Loss, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Speech Disorders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-23
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-02-05 23:45:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 25,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12804999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FictionalFeather/pseuds/FictionalFeather
Summary: But Steve looks at him and sees Bucky. He says Bucky like it’s fact, like he’s alive, like Bucky is the person standing there. But he’s not. He’s not, and the longer he allows Steve to go on believing he is, the more it’s going to hurt him. And whatever else Bucky doesn’t know, whatever his mind won’t give him, what’s clearest above everything is that he doesn’t want to see Steve hurt. Never again.





	1. Trouble

**Author's Note:**

> The idea for this story first came about when I read The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry, which is basically an analysis of pain, torture, trauma, war, etc., and deals a good bit with the effects of these things on language. I then got obsessed with Imagine Dragons’ Smoke + Mirrors album, and mixing the two meant I got snippets of a story based on songs from the album, and it turned into this. Also, [these](https://saysaraelle.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/pain-personhood-and-parity-the-depiction-of-bucky-barnes-in-the-marvel-cinematic-universe/) [two](https://saysaraelle.wordpress.com/2016/06/30/on-reaching-the-end-be-without-sorrow-depicting-bucky-barnes-in-captain-america-civil-war/) essays provided a lot of inspiration and [saysaraelle](https://saysaraelle.wordpress.com/) is just amazing enough to deserve a mention anyway. Go read the meta goodness.  
> You really don’t need to know a thing about Smoke + Mirrors, it’s just that each part of this story is named for/takes inspiration from one of the songs on it. You’re not missing much; it was more about me making myself chuckle by sneaking in references to the lyrics.

He tells Steve he’s leaving.  


Not now, but he can’t stay here. Can’t risk it. Not when the Soldier is still in his head.  


Steve doesn’t believe him, doesn’t think that Bucky ( _James_ ) will implode and leave the Soldier standing in his place. Steve is patient reassurance and little smiles and Bucky doesn’t know what to do. He’s already said he’s dangerous, already told Steve he’ll bolt sooner or later because of it. But Steve doesn’t hear him and Bucky’s tired.  


He doesn’t know who he is. Steve calls him Bucky and he accepts it because he wears the face of the man in the pictures, the one at the exhibit. But Bucky Barnes is someone who used to exist. He’s dead. He died a long time ago, and this face, this body, this mind made of destruction and blurry images, they are somebody else.  


But Steve looks at him and sees Bucky. He says Bucky like it’s fact, like he’s alive, like Bucky is the person standing there. But he’s not. He’s not, and the longer he allows Steve to go on believing he is, the more it’s going to hurt him. And whatever else Bucky doesn’t know, whatever his mind won’t give him, what’s clearest above everything is that he doesn’t want to see Steve hurt. Never again.  


So he needs to leave. He struggles to tell this to Steve, forcing out syllables of words that just won’t connect, but Steve still can’t see that he’s damaged. Deconstructed. Not his friend. Steve asks why, and Bucky can only attempt to explain that he refuses to be a burden. And he knows even if he could say it properly, Steve would tell him he’s not, of course he’s not. But Bucky knows, he _knows_ he’s not what Steve wants, who he wants. He never will be. He can’t become somebody he can’t remember, and he can’t build a person out of the wreckage in his head.  


Steve tells him the memories will come back. Everyone tells him they’ll come back. And Steve is…He knows Steve, or knows that he knows him. And Steve says he remembers him, remembers Bucky and knows Bucky and knows that this person is Bucky ( _James Buchanan Barnes_ ). He doesn’t see the Soldier. He talks about his Bucky, the one he knew as a kid, but Bucky doesn’t remember. There’s so much he does not remember. All the things he doesn’t know, they could be somewhere in Steve. He could be some sort of catalyst for all the blocked off parts of him. But Bucky can’t risk waiting around long enough to find out. He’s been here for two weeks (that’s what they tell; he can’t remember) and knows nothing. Nothing but that he’s dangerous and there’s a part of himself that he’s terrified of, scared of the knowledge and scared of it leaking up through the walls he’s put around it, scared that it remembers he wanted to hurt Steve. To kill him. He remembers that.  


The Soldier is still in there. Bucky can feel him. He can’t keep him pinned down forever. He’s not that strong. Can’t keep him locked up, bound, pushed deep underneath the rubble inside his mind. He’ll climb out of it. And he can’t be around Steve when it happens.  


He feels enough to know it will hurt Steve when he disappears, and it burns like acid to know that, but he has no faith in his own ability to not crumble. Steve can’t hold him up forever.  


The Soldier can’t stay here.  


He tells Steve he’s leaving.


	2. Smoke and Mirrors

He doesn’t know if he trusts his thoughts, his memories. He loses hours, days, and it’s easy to see how untrustworthy his head is when all this technology is so willing to tell him the time and date but he’s not when he thought he was. 

Steve will sometimes talk to him while he’s gone, will ask him what’s wrong, as if Bucky could put words to anything he thinks he feels. Sometimes he doesn’t even react, Steve tells him. Bucky accepts that as truth; it fits. A small mark on the list of what he knows to be true: sometimes Bucky gets lost in his darkness and is not aware of anything else. And this terrifies him. 

But sometimes he hears Steve. Looks at him. He recognizes the words, understands the sentence they form, but doesn’t respond. He can’t. He has no words. ( _The asset does not speak._ ) There isn’t a connection between what Bucky has inside, locked down and impenetrable, and Steve’s blue eyes, his face that gives away so much. Steve does not belong in his head, not with everything else in there, and so Bucky can’t respond. 

He wishes Steve could help. Wishes that he wasn’t so dismantled that even Steve’s absolute trust in his own unfounded beliefs about Bucky does nothing. Steve is…his friend. Steve and Bucky were best friends. He thinks he can trust that. There’s something…there are pieces of pictures, flashes that leave him blind when he tries to reach for them. He sees a fire escape, sees a pretty girl dancing, sees Steve with a smile too big for him, sees uniforms, sees Steve with a black eye, sees a sparse room with the city in the window, sees Steve drawing, sees a soldier dying next to him, sees Steve looking up at him, sees Steve looking down at him, sees _Steve, Steve, Steve._

That could be enough. He could take those milliseconds of time and use them as evidence, proof that he’s Bucky Barnes, the real one, Steve Rogers’ best friend. But they’re gone too quick. He can’t pin them down, can’t snipe at memories, and cannot take action, cannot accept something as fact when there is no evidence. False information leads to failure. This isn’t good enough, not tangible enough. 

He knows the Soldier is still inside him, a slow-acting poison that will consume this person who wants to be Bucky Barnes, and it hurts. It _hurts_ that he can’t change, he can’t remember, he can’t reassemble whatever’s left of himself because the parts he has are twisted, frayed, broken into tiny pieces and mauled beyond recognition. 

There had been something when he first came back that he now recognizes as hope. He’d hoped that being here, being with Steve, would help. He’d hoped Steve’s memories and all his belief could be some kind of blueprint and Steve could rebuild him. But now that hope is out of reach, like the memories he can’t grab. That hope had been riding on his idea of Steve, not the real one. Now that he’s with the real one and sees that things are so different than that world he’d cast his hope into, it has nothing to hold on to, and is drifting away. The Bucky that Steve’s looking for isn’t there. He can’t be, or else he’d have more to go on that words about him, beliefs about him, memories of him. The world remembers Bucky, but he does not remember his world. 

The Soldier had no use for this sort of memory, not about something as meaningless as identity. The Soldier was given orders to follow and did not need to care about who he was. 

Caring hurts. Keeping the Soldier buried also hurts.


	3. The Unknown

Steve is a hero, but there must be another word for somebody so set on martyrdom but refusing to acknowledge it. Bucky has no other way to describe how he’s always been able to throw himself into situations where he can put another’s needs before his own. Bucky’s read everything, studied everything there is on Steve Rogers. He knows the story as well as he knows the story of Bucky Barnes. Steve wants to save the world, wants to stop a thousand wars and if his own life is sacrificed in doing so, he’d be happy to die a hero. Martyr. 

Steve Rogers believes in the good in people. This is a truth Bucky’s easily able to accept. He is unable to accept that Steve sees good in him. This is the only rationale Bucky can conjure for why Steve thinks Bucky is his mission; he appeals to Steve’s self-sacrificing instincts. There is nothing to save in Bucky, and Steve can see it. He knows how broken Bucky is and recognizes it as a mission that cannot be won, one that may well end in his death if Bucky is unable to keep hold of the Soldier, and so he continues to try. He wants to ruin himself on the jagged edges of Bucky’s darkness. 

But Steve remains entirely unaware of this. 

He keeps telling Bucky (with so much certainty that he _is_ Bucky) that he’s getting better, that he will continue to get better. He keeps saying that Bucky will be able to see past the horrific things he’s done. He keeps digging so deep trying to find the good that Bucky’s afraid Steve’s going to bash through everything he’s used to keep the Soldier from coming out. He wishes Steve would get out of his head and into his own, that he would see the good in himself and realize he doesn’t have to ruin himself like this. 

Steve’s always been the good one. He was, _is_ the one with light inside that shines out in everything he does. It blinds Bucky, how much Steve wants to save him, because Bucky hasn’t known a light like that since a time lost to him. But where there is light there is darkness, and the more Steve forces his love, his kindness, his _forgiveness_ into the crevasses of Bucky’s mind, the greater the darkness becomes. 

He doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want Steve to waste himself, to ruin himself on a lost cause. He wants…He wants there to be something good for Steve to find, but it’s not there. There’s nothing there. He tries to tell Steve this, but he can’t find the words. He’s spoken so little the past few months. Russian comes easier to him than English, but even then, he can only force out fragments, stilted and inaccurate pieces of thoughts that won’t flow from his mind to his lips. But he so rarely knows, anyway, what words he could put to what he sees, feels, remembers. Everything’s too big, too overpowering, too much, enough that that the idea of putting them into groupings of letters is laughable. 

But he says “I’m sorry.” It’s a phrase he spat out when he first came here, and one he says often. He’s afraid of it losing meaning, he says it so much. Afraid of it becoming a mantra, but he means it every time. It’s a truth, a fact. He knows everything he’s sorry for. 

And Steve brushes it off every time, even when he has no idea why Bucky is sorry, when Bucky tries to, _wants_ to explain, and there is so much he needs to apologize for. He tries to give Steve this one good thing, show him that he is guilty and repentant, and Steve can’t see anything Bucky needs to be sorry about because he shines too bright in Bucky’s mind. Steve doesn’t want to see the bad, so he pretends Bucky is innocent. 

He is Steve’s weakness, and Bucky thinks he’s always known this. 

Bucky knows there is some piece of him hoping Steve is right, that his mind will start to repair itself and there can be good again, but he’s afraid of the answers he’ll get when he wonders how much good could be inside him, and he doesn’t trust in hope.


	4. Gold

Steve is happy. Bucky doesn’t want to tell him that he doesn’t trust his memories. 

Because he does have memories of Steve. Steve and Bucky. He remembers a fire escape, liquor, and a night sky with barely any stars. Steve couldn’t drink much. He was smaller then. Steve doesn’t know how much he remembers, because Bucky’s only tried telling him some of it, but what would it do to him if Bucky said he doesn’t know what’s real? 

How can he know that what he’s seeing are facts? The entire time he’s been here, his existence has been colored by Bucky Barnes and how much he wants to be that person. It’s starting to seem more and more like he really could be Bucky; the memories could attest to that, but what if he’s making them up? 

Something he knows he remembers, something he truly knows is fact, is HYDRA altered his mind. They broke him to where he didn’t fight when he was told to kill. There was nothing inside him that told him not to listen. He did not ask questions, did not consider morality—his own, his victims’, his handlers’ ( _torturers_ , they’ve told him to stop thinking he was a feral animal that needed to handled, but he wonders at this, because they’ve all seen what he’ll do when he’s not under control). 

It was so easy to plant these ideas in his head, to feed him missions, and there would be nothing else going on in his head. He was single-minded, unquestionably loyal to the facts fed to him. 

Why should that be any different now? Why wouldn’t it be just as easy to make ideas, create false images based on the words and desires of another person? Two facts on his list: he knows he wants Steve to be happy, and he knows that Bucky makes Steve happy. There are no facts to refute the idea that he is falsifying evidence in trying to make himself into what Steve wants. 

It hurts. He wants to be Bucky. He wants to be the person everyone in the damn tower makes him out to be. They hold him up like he’s okay, like he’s saved and recovering, but he is a false idol. They don’t see the inside, the gouges in his soul. 

And Steve, Steve is the worst, looking at Bucky like he’s made of gold, like he doesn’t know gold is malleable; it can be shaped, or beaten so thin as to be translucent. It’s unstable. It can’t be trusted to always be the same. 

He doesn’t want this. He doesn’t want to be grappling with hope. He’d had it, at the beginning. Steve gave it to him. But it’s trying more than ever to leave him, given up on finding anything salvageable in his darkness, and Bucky is afraid to give up. It terrifies him that the weeks stretch on and he still can’t figure out who he is. Because if he isn’t anybody, then all that’s left is the asset. He feels like there’s nothing for him to hold on to, no ledge for him to stand on, he’s just drifting in the midst of personhood while the Soldier is clawing at his cage, screaming to be let out. 

He tries to tell Steve, as if somehow he thinks Steve has an answer, but his stammering attempts at stringing the right words together leave him too frustrated to even worry about what Steve would think if Bucky could actually tell him. It’s as if every word has to be meticulously chosen, as if the path from one to the next has been slowed to the point where Bucky can see the infinite choices branching off from each word, how choosing one word closes off so many options but opens up so many more. He has to be so careful in picking the right words because when he isn’t, when he just wades through and follows the path that makes most sense to him, what he actually says is meandering, a jumble of related terms. 

When speech fails him this much, he retreats, both physically and mentally. He makes himself small. Jaw clenching. Small angry breaths through his nose. Casting around for what he knows he can say clearly, truths on his list, something that isn’t “I’m sorry,” because it’s never been enough to make Steve understand. 

“I want my life back.”


	5. Hopeless Opus

There’s just so much. Too much to process. On top of all the things he can’t remember are all the things he has to learn. He’s seen the world change in snapshots; watching the decades turn was his only indicator that time was passing, that he was in cryo for years at a time, not hours or weeks. He only kept up with technology via mission briefings, telling him only what he needed to know, letting him acclimate just enough that there would be no distractions. 

Now…Now it’s all here. He can be sidetracked, preoccupied. He has a tablet courtesy of Stark (a different Stark, but the charismatic arrogance is so much the same that Bucky now has another man he remembers from before), and he’ll be distracted for hours, lost in much the same way as the catatonic episodes Steve says happen so rarely anymore. He’ll be utterly entranced, immersed in discovering the world, until the machine interrupts with a notification of low power and he jerks into awareness, gut dropping and heart racing because _the asset is not allowed_ , and sometimes he can’t come down from that on his own, sometimes it has to be Steve. 

“You’re here. You’re Bucky.” 

_Don’t call me that._

“You’re allowed to have things. You’re allowed to choose. You’re right here, now, with me.” 

And that should go against everything, the concept of choice, the idea of owning things, things the Soldier didn’t need and so was not given. Was not allowed. 

But he keeps doing it. He sits on the bed ( _his_ bed) that he still can’t sleep on (he’s tried, but even on the nights when he thinks he’s tired enough to face the nightmares, for the blindingly terrifying moments when he wakes up convinced he’s slipped, that it was real, that the Soldier escaped—even on those nights, the bed is a foreign luxury, a place he shouldn’t taint with what happens when he sleeps) and devours the internet until he breaks again. 

For everyone else, it’s a mask they wear. A persona. They put on their suits and go out and save the world and come back and take off those suits. Bucky cannot do this. He can’t just let go of parts of himself when there isn’t a crisis at hand, because for him, there is always a crisis. He doesn’t get to have the relief of the job being done, the day being over, of coming home and washing away the dirt and blood. 

Bucky can’t drop the part of him that’s always on guard, the part that wants to be whole. But all the holes in his head, all that empty space…if he can’t fill it up with the person Bucky Barnes is supposed to be, then he can still patch it over. He can stop trying to search for what’s missing. Steve keeps reassuring him that Bucky has choice now, has agency over his own actions. But he doesn’t have any control over his memories, what comes to him and when, whether it’s pleasant or horrific, informative or confusing. He can’t control what he thinks about ( _mission, cold, target, asset, guilty_ ). 

So he chooses not to think, chooses instead to give himself over to words on a screen. Because that doesn’t hurt, doesn’t make him feel the weight of culpability crushing his insides. 

“Didn’t think it would be this,” he tells Steve once, when they’re sitting with their backs against the wall, on the floor beside Bucky’s bed. 

“Be what?” 

Bucky’s still sweating, still can’t breathe like he should, so he’s even less prepared than normal to try and convert emotions into words. He shakes his head. His left hand gestures briefly, more of a twitch than anything. 

“Fucked up.” 

“You’re not fucked up.” 

And there’s no resigned sigh, no reproach, no adamancy, it’s just a sentence articulated softly and so much like a truth that Bucky looks at Steve and knows there is anger showing on his face, even if he can’t comprehend why. 

“You’re hurting.” Steve says it like he knows, but he could never know this. He hasn’t lived it. “I know things aren’t how you want them to be.” That’s fact, that’s a summary of all the things he’s tried to tell Steve for weeks ( _months?_ ). “I know it’s not a picture-perfect life. But Bucky, you’ve come so far and I wish you could see it.” 

That’s not something he can accept as true. How far has he come? What has he come far from? The Soldier is still there, still in his head. The memories of the terrible things he’s done are still there. He’s never far from them. 

“Still…” Bucky grasps as words, clenches one hand into a fist and sweeps the other through the air, like he’s trying to clear away the perpetual fog that seems to hold all his thoughts and stop them from becoming coherent. “They…nothing’s…” His whole body tenses with frustration. 

“I killed people.” Facts are easier to say. There’s no feeling in stating a fact. 

“You didn’t want to.” 

But he doesn’t know if that’s fact or not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, Steve. Yes, I do realize that in brushing off Bucky’s fear of his dark side, Steve is essentially denying Bucky’s pain and/or his right to experience that pain/fear. And it's only going to get worse. A few points on this. First off, these are Bucky’s thoughts and we can’t know how reliable he is as a narrator given what he’s going through. Second, while they’ve both been through loads of shit, they’ve had vastly different experiences. Steve doesn’t understand what Bucky’s feeling, he just feels helpless because he just wants Bucky to feel better. Bucky understandably has trouble imagining other people’s pain given, again, what he’s experiencing. Communication is a big issue here. Here’s some of what Elaine Scarry has to say on the subject: "…when one speaks about "one's own physical pain" and about "another person's physical pain," one might almost appear to be speaking about two wholly distinct orders of events. For the person whose pain it is, it is "effortlessly" grasped (that is even with the most heroic effort it cannot not be grasped); while for the person outside the sufferer's body, what is "effortless" is not grasping it (it is easy to remain wholly unaware of its existence; even with effort, one…may retain the astonishing freedom of denying its existence; and, finally, if with the best effort of sustained attention one successfully apprehends it, the aversiveness of the "it" one apprehends will only be a shadowy fraction of the actual "it")."…“…to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt. (The doubt of other persons…amplifies the suffering of those already in pain.)"


	6. Warriors

Bucky does not agree with Steve. 

Saying he didn’t want to kill people is not stating a fact. But neither is saying he wanted to. He was not concerned with the people. He focused on the mission. With a target, there was only success or failure, not life or death. He was trained ( _the Soldier_ was trained, but at what point do they deviate?) to kill, not empathize. 

And now he has the option, the choice of looking back and wishing he hadn’t murdered them. But whatever he feels, whatever he knows to be true now does nothing to change what was true then. And what was true then was the asset’s drive to fulfill his mission. So Steve is wrong to say that Bucky didn’t want to. 

“You had no choice.” 

“It was me.” 

“That wasn’t you. They were controlling you.” Steve keeps coming back to that, that Bucky had no choice then but he does now, like he thinks Bucky is free to just choose not to feel remorse. 

“Inside.” It comes out louder than he’d intended, and he breathes deep, checks the trash pile in the back of his mind and yes, the Soldier is still safely pinned. “It was me. You found me.” 

Steve stares at him. Bucky stares at the wall. 

“You think that because you were trapped in there, you’re responsible for all of it?” 

And it sounds like an earnest question, like Steve really could be naïve enough to not get it. 

“Buck, you can’t take all that onto yourself, there was nothing-” 

“Can’t…pretend, just…just turn away. Say nothing happened.” 

“So, what, you’re made your bed and now you’re gonna lie in it?” 

The exasperation in Steve’s voice feels like victory. He hates it. 

“You can’t feel guilty for things you had no control over.” 

But he can. He knows he can, because he does. 

He’s not saying anything, and Steve must not be able to see, this time, that’s he trying to organize his words, because he places a hand on Bucky’s shoulder and gives him that concerned look Bucky thought he’d be tired of seeing by now before leaving. 

He keeps doing that. Touching Bucky without necessity. Steve’s hands seem to fidget incessantly except for when he touches Bucky. His shoulder, usually. The right one. Sometimes a hand placed over his. And Bucky can recognize that it feels good, and he thinks that maybe when he first came here he would have jerked away, even if he’s known all along Steve isn’t a threat. Having Steve close is…good. It feels good to have him pressed close beside him when Bucky’s backed against the wall trying to steady his breathing and stopping himself from trembling by sheer will. He knows it’s like what they used to do ( _what Bucky used to do_ ) when Steve was the one who couldn’t breathe. 

Memories of Steve being weak are the most confusing, the most jarring. Not just because of the man he sees now, but because so many his memories don’t fit with that idea. Steve was never weak; he was ready to stand against anything. He’s always known he was meant to do something, to accomplish something big. Steve would deny it, back then, say it was just a dream, that he’d never be able to do anything, and Bucky would- 

Sometimes those memories won’t go any further, always stopping at the point where Bucky should be. He has other memories of Bucky, a young man with confidence that too often didn’t stop short of cockiness. And there are a few things he remembers of how he and Steve fit together, flashes of easy camaraderie, his arm around Steve’s shoulders, sharing a look and both just knowing the other was laughing inside. 

But sometimes…He just doesn’t have a precedent for how to talk to Steve as Bucky, because his mind won’t show him. All he can see is the Steve who wanted to achieve something and all he can do is try and reconcile that with who Steve is now. 

Because now, Steve can do anything he wants. He’s more capable than he’s ever been. Not just physically; his spirit is even stronger. He can be the hero he always wished he was. 

But not with him around. Even Bucky can see it. He’s Steve’s weakness. Steve’s chosen to try and save him when he could be so much more without Bucky around. He deserves to be more. 

He could shine so much brighter without a broken imitation of who used to be his best friend.


	7. Shots

Steve and Bucky were in love. He remembers enough, is able to put together enough of a timeline that this is an inference he’s pretty sure he believes. Trusts. Before, when they were boys in Brooklyn, they never talked about it, unless that part is still hidden from Bucky. They’d been so close for so long that there was never a revelation, just a seamless sweep into touching, kissing, sex. The lines blurred, and Bucky doesn’t know why, whether it’s his fucked up memories, or whether he and Steve never brought it up because they never needed to. 

The knowledge pulls at him. Threatens to pull at a loose string and unravel the tremulous hold he has on who he is, how he’s supposed to feel. Because this is what Steve’s been seeing, all this time. He’s been looking at Bucky and remembering how they used to be, and Bucky didn’t even know. He’d known they were close, he’s known that to be true since the first time Steve said his name because for that one moment, the mission was forgotten, snapped away, and he was terrifyingly lost, something screaming in his head and everything was wrong, wrong, _wrong_ before the Soldier took over and he didn’t have to think anymore. 

But Bucky hadn’t known they were in love. 

He asks over breakfast one day. (Bucky hasn’t vomited in weeks, and that’s one thing he clings to desperately as a sign of change, that his body is changing; eating is good so there must be something good in him. He wants to believe it so much.) 

“Were we lovers?” Bucky doesn’t actually want to talk about it, doesn’t want Steve to realize that he’s just now remembering, but he had the words, the right words, and he wants to know, without any doubt. Maybe Steve can finally start filling in the gaps. 

Steve looks over at him before setting his fork down. He’s not shocked, so Bucky was right about some of it, at least. But Steve looks down at his plate, clears his throat, wets his lips. He’s uncomfortable. Bucky’s wrong about something. 

“That’s probably something you should remember on your own.” 

Bucky remembers them (Doctors? Therapists? It feels like so long ago.) talking about the fine line between triggering a memory and his mind simply creating new ones from given information. But he’s not asking for details, for specific memories. 

“I do.” 

The way Steve jerks his head up to look at him feels like a punch to the gut. 

“I…I don’t.” Everything in his head is so damn blurry and it’s so hard to keep this one set of thoughts there at the forefront of his mind when he’s also trying to make himself coherent. 

“It’s…You and me. We never talked.” Bucky knows he’s rubbing his forehead like he has a headache, but the struggle to reach for memories feels like one. “Why?” 

He looks over and Steve is speechless. For the first time since Bucky came to the tower, Steve doesn’t know what to say. The one time Bucky wants him to talk, even if just to tell him he’s confused, and all Steve can do is stare at him with a look Bucky can’t read (and that hurts more than it should, because he knows he should be able to read Steve, used to do it so easily, but as accurately as he can read body language, the nuances of expressions are lost to him). 

“Please?” _Please say something? Please tell me I’m right? Please tell me my mind is fucking with me?_ It just came out, had been a loop in his head and he’s not even sure whether he spat it out in Russian or English. 

Steve finally looks away, looks over and down, still uncomfortable. He breathes deep, fingers tracing the rim of his plate. 

“We…did things. We weren’t together, like that, not really, but…” Steve shrugs with one arm, shoulder barely moving, shakes his head once. “There was something. We never talked about it because it wasn’t something you talked about back then. If we said something, that made it real, and if it was real…” It’s like he cuts himself off rather than leaving the sentence dangling, like he doesn’t want to think about if it was real. 

There’s a flash of the docks and something about blue tickets and Bucky doesn’t know what it means, but he knows, somehow, that it was just as dangerous for them to be together then as it is now. The danger just comes from different places. 

He’s never been safe. Whatever Steve may have seen in him, before, it’s not there. It’s been replaced by something dangerous. HYDRA made sure of that. They made sure he could never see himself as anything but a loaded gun because he has a weapon attached to his body. He has a limb, a hand, that has never touched gently, never held anything with care or caution or reverence. It was forged with the Soldier, part of the asset, created to kill. His arm has dealt so much hurt and it’s like he’s feeling all of it himself in the ache of his shoulder, the strain he can feel deep in his muscles, the sudden sparks of agony he’d always taken as mechanical in nature until he read about phantom pains (and the phrase is too damn accurate; he’s haunted by it because now he doesn’t know why it hurts). 

There had been talk of Stark working on the arm, but Bucky refuses. He knows where the pain would take him. But it’s more than that. It’s _his_ arm, _his_ burden, and if he has nothing else to truly call his own in his life, he has the arm, his anchor to the world and the things he’d done to it, and his reminder of what he doesn’t want to be. Nobody can take that from him. 

His arm stays, but with its permanence comes another pain. 

It’s hard to look at Steve anymore. It’s hard when he’s close, because Bucky can see more and more of how they used to be, and every time his eyes flicker to Steve’s lips he feels sick. He wants to panic, and if he trusted himself any more, he might let himself be afraid, but there’s no point in it. No point in worrying about wanting Steve like he does because he’s never going to let anything come of it. Not as long as he remains a danger to himself and everyone around him, even if nobody else can see that. Especially Steve, and he’s the one Bucky’s most likely to hurt. Physically, emotionally…He shouldn’t be around Steve. 

But he doesn’t think Steve will ever understand that. Bucky’s tried to tell him but it always ends with him wanting to scream, to punch something, anything to get the frustration of silence out instead of in. But he can’t go down that path because if he starts ruining something, he’s afraid he’ll never stop, so trying to tell Steve he needs to give up always ends with Bucky forced into silence by his own need to explain. 

He wants to say that he still doesn’t know who he’s supposed to be, doesn’t know who Bucky Barnes would be now. He doesn’t know what he wants, except for Steve. He doesn’t know how to keep the Soldier dead inside him, because it feels like he’s just been running looking over his shoulder and he’s going to hit a wall sooner or later. It feels like he’s waiting to break, and he _doesn’t know how to say it._

He wishes he could run from Steve. Run from his concern, his belief, his eyes, his words, his _certainty_ that Bucky is a good person. Steve makes everything hazy. He makes Bucky want to close his eyes and breathe and just _be_. The one person he most wants to protect is the one who most makes him want to let his guard down. It’s so hard to be cautious when Steve is smiling at him, talking to him, touching him. Gone is the clarity he’d had months ago, the knowing that he couldn’t stay, would have to leave. He almost…He almost wants to stay, that’s how much he wants to be with Steve, and it’s selfish, but he wants it. 

Bucky still gets stuck wanting a mission sometimes. The absolute lucidity of knowing what to do, when, in what way. The boundaries of success and failure. Maybe if he could see this as a mission, paths wouldn’t be diverging in front of him much the same way words do, thoughts showing him choices, so many damn choices. Who to be, who he wants to be, whether he wants Steve here or gone, what he does with his days, what to eat and when, what to fucking _wear_. Steve will tell him if he’s worn the same thing more than two days in a row, because Bucky doesn’t like thinking about clothes. When he does, he just gets reminded that no normal human being would be thrust into catatonic frustration ( _disgrace_ ) over trying to pick out which shirt of three they own, unwilling ( _unable?_ ) to speak until their best friend places one in front of them. 

It’s stupid to be overcome by such a small choice, but actions have consequences. He’s been learning that lesson in horrific detail since the war. Choices lead to actions. Any action the Soldier took wasn’t about choice, just success or failure. 

There is no success to be had here, in this tower, with Steve. There are no parameters. If there is nothing defined as victory, what is he supposed to strive for? Nobody else can tell him, or rather, he knows now that nobody else _should_ tell him what he’s supposed to do, but without instruction, he can’t figure out what he’s supposed to see as his goal. Of all the deviating roads twisting themselves in knotted spirals in his head, Bucky cannot find one that leads to something being okay. 

He wants Steve safe. Is that his mission? If it is, he’s failing at it; he’ll always lose when it comes to Steve. Steve won’t let go of him, won’t give up, won’t even go back to his apartment. Won’t let Bucky drift away, let him leave and go someplace where he can only hurt himself. Nobody else. One memory he knows is true is that of Steve’s bloodied, broken face set in determined resignation as he fell. It brings with it something that makes Bucky feel sick, a flash of cold through his entire body. He tells Steve he remembers this and Steve takes it as a good thing, that he’s recognized when he started coming back to himself. 

Pain is one of the hardest things to talk about. He thinks he’s known that for a long time. 

“You can change your mind,” he says once. _Choices, you’ve been making them all your life, you know how to choose, you can decide._

Steve’s confused, maybe worried. Apprehensive. “About what?” 

“Me.” _You can give up on me, decide I’m not worth it._

Steve is silent, and maybe, _maybe_ there’s something in Bucky that sparks in a good way when he can tell Steve is looking for words, like Bucky has to every time he wants to speak. 

“There’s nothing for me to change my mind about,” Steve says eventually. Softly. “Do you think I regret any of it?” 

“No.” _You should and you don’t._

“Good, because I don’t.” He slips his hand under Bucky’s and there it is, that desire to run that strangles his speech even more. “I want to help you. But I don’t know how.” 

_Neither do I._

“What do you need, Buck? What do you want?” 

_I don’t know, I don’t_ know _, you can’t help me, I don’t know what I want and I can’t help you and if I could you’d make me want to stay._

“I can’t hurt you.” 

The grip on his hand tightens. “I know.” 

_No._

_You’re wrong._


	8. It Comes Back to You

Bucky sleeps more. He’s not really sure what to make of this. The Soldier rarely slept, and it was always in short bursts, on his back, knife in hand. 

Now, he can sleep for hours. But still never through the night. Late to bed, early to rise. He’s been trying the bed more, but it keeps him awake even longer, lying there trying to shut off his mind. But Steve doesn’t like when he sleeps on the floor, and Bucky’s finally starting to think that it may be the cause of the odd aches he wakes up to, so he compromises and pulls some blankets and a pillow to the floor. 

He’s not used to putting himself to sleep. It’s not like slipping under the cold, and he sometimes misses the way he felt it seizing him. Lying and waiting is difficult. He doesn’t like waking up and being able to be completely alert at once. That’s too much like the Soldier, immediately analyzing the area around him, muscles tense with readiness. But hates waking up to find himself like that. Coming out of cryo was different. Slower. There were voices before he could decipher what was being said, sensations on his body before he could feel the individual fingers of the hands on him. 

It’s 4:13 in the morning. (He likes knowing the time. The numbers are always indisputable.) He’s thinking about getting a glass of water, and he wonders if walking past the room where Steve sleeps will wake him up. Probably not; Bucky’s more than capable of being quiet enough, but he thinks what’s going on is he doesn’t want to walk past Steve’s room because he might stop outside the door and be caught up by choices. The last time Bucky had let himself be heard walking around in the early hours of the morning, Steve had followed him, and the still air and Steve’s sleepy half-smile had led to Steve’s lips on his. 

Kissing Steve has been…confusing. Bucky’s confused about a lot of things, he knows that, but he thinks it’s the best word to use. It’s upsetting and disruptive, because this isn’t what Bucky wanted, this wasn’t supposed to happen, but the look on Steve’s face every time Bucky kisses him is what makes him keep doing it. Steve looks at peace, smiling instead of worrying, instead of searching for good things. 

It makes him remember things. More than he wants to, because sometimes he can’t tell what’s memory and what’s desire, what happened and what he wants to happen ( _What he’d wanted to happen?_ ). And yes, he knows he wants things and that’s starting to feel normal. He can see, at least rationally, that it’s okay to want things for himself now, to want and look for a future. And if he believes what everyone’s telling him, that he’s going to get better and autonomy won’t be so difficult, then he sees that there is a future for him, a good one. It’s vague, like the cloud in his head, but there could be good things in his future. Maybe he could have good things. 

It feels strange to even consider it. Bucky doesn’t believe that anyone knows him better than he knows himself, and he knows that finding a way to this theoretical future is above his capability. An unfulfillable mission. They can tell him he’s making progress, and they do, often, but they can’t know that he’s afraid the memories of being with Steve, before, aren’t real. There’s more to say that they’re real than that they’re not (because Steve said they’d done things, and he thinks he can accept that as truth), but what if he’s making things up? What if he’s so enamored with Steve here, present, in front of him, real, that he’s manufacturing a past they never had? What if he just wants Steve to be one of those good things in his future? How can he even want to strive for a future like that when he doesn’t know what’s real? 

“It comes back to you.” 

Sam told him that, and those words have been replaying in his head the past few days. 

“Everything you lost? It’ll all find its way back.” 

He thinks he likes Sam. He’s a good friend for Steve. Sam doesn’t push, doesn’t try to cram hope inside Bucky. Sam isn’t always telling him he’s doing much better with a false smile. Sam might understand him better than Steve. Or at least, he knows what Bucky wants better than Steve. And sometimes he says things that linger for days, things that Bucky has to think about. He knows Sam has lost people, lost things, and now he helps people, and Bucky wonders if that’s how Sam understands so much. Does he do this to other people too? Throw tape over a gaping wound and somehow make it stick? Because his words should slide away, useless, but they’ve managed to find footholds on Bucky’s pile of darkness. They’re circling around the cloud of jumbled words and thoughts and Bucky can’t shake them. 

But just because Bucky can’t stop thinking about something doesn’t make it true. It could be true. It could be wrong. Sam could be completely wrong and Bucky might never regain any more than he already has. 

But he wants to accept this truth. He wants it to be real, and he’s okay with that. 

Bucky gets up and silently walks to Steve’s room, sitting against the wall next to the door. He knows if he wakes Steve up, he’ll worry and ask if he’s okay, and Bucky will try to tell him, again, that the Soldier is still in there and he can’t keep him contained forever, and Steve won’t believe him. He’ll tell Bucky he’s his own person now, he’s in control, he’s come so far, and it’ll end in frustration, anger. Being angry scares him, but he thinks he’s often angry when he’s around Steve, which is why it’s so dangerous to keep kissing him. 

When the sun is rising and Steve gets up, Bucky’s still sitting on the floor outside his room, still wondering what Sam would say if Bucky told him the Soldier wanted to escape.


	9. Friction

“You can’t save me.” 

“Bucky, you don’t need to be saved.” 

“…trying.” 

“I know. I know you’ve been trying and you’re tired, but-” 

“No…No, you keep trying.” 

“Trying to save you?” 

“It…I’ll decompose, I…can’t stop it.” 

“What can’t you stop?” 

“Stop it.” 

“Me?” 

“No. No, that’s…it’s not…you can’t save me.” 

“Buck, I’m not trying to save you. I want to help you.” 

“Martyr.” 

“What?” 

“I’m not…for…you can’t…why can’t you let me go?” 

“Let you go? I don’t…I mean, if that’s what you want, it’s fine. We don’t have to…Bucky, stop. Breathe.” 

“You can’t save me!” 

“I don’t understand. What do you want me to do?” 

“I want…my head, out…it’s still there.” 

“…Bucky, we talked about this. That’s not you. It wasn’t then, and it’s definitely not now.” 

“He wants…I’m your victim.” 

“My victim?” 

“You…You can’t save me, you…I can’t fix it, and you…it hurts.” 

“Buck, no, stop. Let go. Give me your hand.” 

“No.” 

“You’re not going to hurt me.” 

“I am. He will. You don’t know, you…want me not broken, and you try to…stop. Stop it.” 

“What, just…stop wanting you to get better?” 

“Stop it.” 

“Bucky, I-” 

“Stop it.”


	10. Thief

Some foreign cocktail of emotions overtakes him when his head hits the floor. He doesn’t want to struggle. He’s pinned, safe, himself. Still Bucky. The Soldier didn’t attack Steve. Bucky did. It’s Bucky on the floor trying to breathe, trying to figure out how fury, gratitude, and fear can mix so easily. 

His flesh arm is pulled back and up; pulling at it, at Steve’s hand gripping it, makes his shoulder burn. Steve’s other hand is flat on his back, between his shoulders. Bucky’s metal arm is trapped by Steve’s knee pushing hard on his palm. The arm doesn’t feel true pain, but it registers like a warning. One of Steve’s legs is pinning Bucky’s thighs. The Soldier would break out of this. The physical pain it would cost wouldn’t matter. But Bucky won’t. He’ll stay. He’ll struggle, because his heart’s beating too fast and he wants to run away, out the window if he has to, but he won’t hurt Steve. 

“Bucky…” 

He doesn’t know why Steve says his name, or if anything was supposed to come after it. 

He doesn’t want to be Bucky right now. He strains, feet trying to push him up, but Steve bears down harder, pulls his arm a little tighter. Bucky can’t breathe. He’s inhaling and exhaling, but it feels so useless under the rush of everything—thoughts, adrenaline, excuses. 

He’d let go for an instant, allowed himself a single moment’s rest, and threw a lamp against the wall. But the sound of it shattering, of Steve’s voice, shocked or reprimanding or both, the sheer relief of being angry…He didn’t want to stop. He punched the wall with his right hand and it didn’t give. He punched it again and saw the blood on the wall but didn’t feel it. 

But Steve had grabbed him, held him back, so he’d turned and swung at Steve instead, and he didn’t stop until Steve had him on the floor. He can’t remember everything that happened, fighting’s too instinctual. But he can feel places on his body that ache, some already radiating the rough itch of healing, and he knows the same thing is happening to Steve. He knows most of the furniture in the room is broken. He knows attacking Steve had felt like more than the dam of frustration bursting. It felt like he was getting his point across and the guilt that comes with that has him shaking. 

“Okay?” 

No. Nothing is okay. He jerks his arm but of course it’s not enough to break Steve’s hold, and it only makes him grunt with pain. 

“Can I let go?” 

“No.” He’s never felt more like he’s fighting with himself. He’s trapped and that makes him want to fight, anything to get free, but he’s terrified of what he’ll do if he’s allowed. He can’t hold up that paradox in his head at the same time as all the guilt, the panic, the knowledge that he fucked up, he hurt Steve, so he struggles only so he can have something to fight against. Because he has to fight. 

“What happened?” 

There’s something in Steve’s voice—incredulity or ire or utter confusion, Bucky can’t tell the difference—that makes Bucky thrash. Steve _knows_ what happened, knows as much as Bucky does, but he still won’t believe it, even after he’s had to pin Bucky to the floor. Something with the roil of anger is mounting and expanding, and Bucky’s trembling, sweating. 

“Bucky, stop!” 

“You don’t know!” It feels good to yell. His chest rumbles against the floor and his voice sounds magnified. It feels like an escape route for whatever the bile is that starts in his gut and makes his heart beat faster, faster. 

“You don’t see, you don’t…I’m not here, I’ll never…I’m never…” The words are there in his mind, he knows what to say, but he can’t breathe, feels like his heart is pounding its way up his throat. 

“I can’t be here. Not who you think.” He’s not yelling anymore, his voice gone from release to enclosure, chocked and forced. 

“You are.” 

And the way Steve says it, not angry, not exasperated, not demanding, not pleading, just so fucking sure of that fact, it makes Bucky feel like his chest is closing in on itself. It’s too hot but he feels like he’s shivering. 

“You don’t fucking get it!” It roars out of him like it’s the only thing he knows, but his voice breaks and his breath stutters. “Steve, he’s still in there. I know. Can’t…get rid of it. Nobody sees…think I’m okay and I’m not, he’s not…can’t keep…everyone ignores him, the truth.” 

Steve is letting go of him, but Bucky still feels pinned, trapped. His feet push him onto his knees, forehead on the floor, hands gripping his head or scratching at the floor. 

“Steve, Steve, I can’t do this.” His voice sounds small even to him, feeble and wavering. He still feels like his chest has no room for his lungs and he suddenly recognizes he’s been crying, is all but sobbing. 

“There’s nothing I can…My whole life…Should have killed me, you should have…let me…I can’t…” 

“Bucky…” 

And the way Steve doesn’t touch him, doesn’t try and tell him he’s wrong, finally doesn’t try to comfort him—it doesn’t make Bucky feel like he thought it would.


	11. Second Chances

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for suicidal ideation in this chapter. If you'd rather not read about it in-depth, skip from 'He said Steve should have' to 'So he goes back inside.'

He doesn’t know how to be around Steve. Not that he ever had, but he’d been able to take some sort of refuge in Steve’s closeness, find some kind of comfort in the way kissing him made his brain quiet down. But it’s been a week, at least, he’s almost sure, and it’s like his insides are an alarm, a siren going at full blast whenever Steve gets near. Bucky goes tense, walking rigidly but quickly with his head down to anywhere that isn’t near Steve. 

The only thing he’s said is “I’m sorry,” because it erupts from him every time like it’s triggered by that silent alarm. He tries not to, sometimes, because he remembers how Steve felt when that was the only thing Bucky would say and he knows the same look is on Steve’s face when he says it now. 

But he can’t stop doing it. Even when Steve tries to talk to him, he never gets out more than a handful of words before Bucky cuts him off and runs away. He wanders the tower more now, not entirely because he wants to, but because it’s easier to avoid Steve. The overly alert state his brain forces him into every time he leaves their apartment helps him to not wonder what he’s supposed to do. 

He goes to the roof. The idea of going outside has been a daunting one, despite his plans (except is it still his plan?) to leave and be on his own, safe, but being up high settles parts of him. So he rests his arms on the ledge and looks. And tries not to think but he can’t. He said Steve should have killed him. He meant it, he knows he did, not because of any feeling but because all the things he wanted to say, was _trying_ to say, had been true. Whatever sort of fear, desperation, or emptiness he’d felt, crying into the floor, had both driven away the fog to let his words through and stolen his chance to let them be heard. He’d felt coiled up, tensed to spring, and he’d lost the control to _not_ say what he felt, what he thought. All his truths ready to be spilled, if he’d only had the air. 

Bucky lives a life of fear and guilt. He knows this to be true. 

But he doesn’t know if he wants to die. Knowing that he should be dead now is different, though still true. There’s no logic as to why he’s still alive. He knows very well how to kill himself. Knows too well how to shut down a body. And though he does not recoil from the idea, he does not move to act on it. If he doesn’t want to die, it means he wants to live. That has to be true, but Bucky can’t accept that, can’t grasp the idea, feels his hands clench when he tries to tell himself he wants to be alive. Is it fear? Anger? What keeps turning him away from being here, being present and living and having hope and wanting things? How is he supposed to make Steve understand anything if he can’t even get it right in his own head? Why is it so important that Steve understands him? 

No, Bucky knows the answer to that and he knows why he turns away from it, even while he keeps wanting to turn to Steve. He can’t help but ache for the steadiness, the way he can start to see through the void even just a little when he’s with Steve, close to him, touching him. But it poisons him to want it so much because when everything comes back, when it’s all dark again, the guilt is stronger. It builds. Multiplies. 

He’s tainted, a weight made of blood and destruction, and he keeps trying to attach himself to Steve like it’s okay to ruin him. Stain him. The light in Steve’s eyes is slowing dismantling Bucky. 

He’s felt this particular anger enough that he knows where it comes from. He wishes he’d never become the Winter Soldier and he wishes he wasn’t broken beyond repair because of it and he hates the people who did it to him. 

The first time he died, he turned into a monster. He’d died and lost all choice, lost everything he’d been. Now he was trying to turn the monster into a person. Into himself. 

What would happen if he died again? Would it really be worse than what he’s having to suffer through every day? 

But when he died, Steve put himself in the ocean. And he won’t say it, but he’ll never convince Bucky that he had no other choice. 

He’s done enough to Steve. He won’t do this. 

So he goes back inside. He goes back to their floor and Steve and Sam are in the kitchen. And when Steve turns to him and says his name with so much _relief_ (he can’t know how much it hurts that he was worried), Bucky doesn’t run away. He shoves his hands in his pockets and looks at anything but Steve and has to fight to keep his breathing steady enough to look calm, but he stays. 

“Where’d you go?” 

“Roof,” Bucky says, but he knows it’s not an explanation, it’s not what Steve wants to hear, not really, and he somehow feels ridiculous just spouting out a single word. It’s worse knowing that Sam is watching him, because Sam always pays attention, always knows what not to say, like he can navigate Bucky’s mind better than Bucky can, and Bucky doesn’t know if can take that right now. But then, what would Sam see if he ran now? 

“Everything okay?” 

No. No, everything is definitely not okay, and Steve knows that, he- 

“I mean, not…” 

That’s different. 

“I meant, is something wrong in particular? Right now?” 

Steve’s being awkward. He’s _nervous_. He finally isn’t shying away from acknowledging the truth, the real fact that Bucky is not okay, is never okay. Did it just take Bucky punching him for him to see it? 

That almost feels like relief, but the words feel too good for them to be Steve’s. It’s the kind of question he’s more likely to have a real answer for—what hurts most _now_ , what is he afraid of _right now_ , what is he most ashamed of _in this moment_ —and he know it must have come from Sam because for all Steve does right, that was a sharp learning curve. Not days ago he’d have let things be at ‘everything okay.’ 

Bucky had already assumed that Steve talked to Sam about him. It made sense. Neither had said anything to him, but he doesn’t consider it to be a behind-the-back thing, because Steve knows Bucky would never let anyone another than Sam try to help. Bucky’s pretty sure if he could have friends, Sam would be one. 

“No,” Bucky says finally, because he can feel Steve looking at him, but it sounds so harsh, and he doesn’t want to leave it there, just one word, one negating syllable. Not with Steve trying and Sam watching. He sucks in a breath too fast and it sounds like he’s gasping. “I…uh…” 

But there’s nothing. He hadn’t planned on saying anything, and now he’s facing that block again, that hurdle that he’s trying so hard to get words over, any words that would be relevant, but there’s nothing. And the anger’s coming back, the same frustration but worse, because it hasn’t been this hard in months; there’d been a flow he sometimes didn’t even have to think about and now it’s just gone. 

“Bucky” 

He looks over at Steve but can’t linger on his face and the concern he sees there. But Steve’s body is tense. Bucky knows how to recognize when someone is about to start running and everything in the way Steve is standing say he wants so much to come closer. And part of Bucky wants him closer but he can’t because that’s dangerous and now he’s guilty, Steve’s worried, Sam’s watching, there’s noise in his head like when too many voices blend together and become insensible babbling and he still hasn’t said anything, can’t even open his mouth. 

He sits down. Just sits on the kitchen floor, cross-legged, elbows on his knees, head down and hands on the back of his neck. He hears footsteps starting and stopping and loses track of what’s happening because his chest is doing that thing again where it’s like his lungs are being squeezed. But he knows it’s Steve that walks away down the hall, and Sam that sits next to him. 

“Bucky? You with me?” 

He shakes his head. He’s not with anyone. Nobody can reach him and it doesn’t matter if he tries to reach out because this is what happens, this terror. It’s like the resurgence of all the dark things he’s tried to push away is punishment for trying to do what was expected of him, trying to talk, trying to be a person. 

“I think that means you are.” There’s a smile in Sam’s voice and fuck him for finding this funny. 

“Alrght, I want you to listen to my voice. You’re gonna breathe in for a count of three, hold it for three, and breathe out for five, okay?” 

Bucky’s first thought is that it’s a load of shit, but he can’t say it, can’t say anything, feels sick, so he does it. Sam counts and Bucky takes breaths that stutter, hiccup, shudder. He sounds feral even to his own ears, but Sam’s voice is unwavering, constant enough that it becomes the backdrop while Bucky fends off a dizziness he knows is precedent to passing out until he suddenly sees drops on the floor—was he crying again?—and notices the strain in his neck, that he’s sweating, that his hands had moved to grip his hair at some point. 

He lets go and he’s breathing, and he doesn’t know how long Sam hasn’t been counting. He lost time again. That sets off a spark of something bad and Bucky sits up, whipping his head around to stare at the readout on the stove until it’s doused. 

He’s okay. He’s here. The Soldier had been screaming, clawing at Bucky’s mind, but he’s still locked away. Nothing was destroyed. Nobody was hurt. Not even himself. He’s okay. 

“That happened before?” 

His body flinches when Sam speaks, despite knowing he was there. Bucky tries to catch himself, contain it, and if Sam notices, he doesn’t say anything. Sam’s voice had been hesitant. A question he already knows the answer to. Bucky doesn’t even nod, just gives Sam a look even though he knows he still doesn’t show emotion with his face, but Sam still gets it. He still fucking gets it. 

“Right, okay.” He looks away and smiles as he says it, one that doesn’t display humor, but ‘you caught me.’ (He’s getting better at reading faces, and he thinks he’s proud of it.) 

Bucky slides backward until he’s against the wall and Sam follows. Leaning his head back against the wall, Bucky can hear music coming from down the hall. He can’t make out what it is, but it’s louder than Steve normally has it. It’s deliberate. To tell them he’s not listening. That, or so they’ll think he’s not while he’s just around the corner. But Bucky can’t imagine that; Steve’s too good for that. 

“Steve says you two got into it a while back.” 

Bucky shuts his eyes, but it’s a useless shield when everything those words throw at him is already inside him. 

“And he’s pretty confused about the whole thing, so I was kinda hoping you could clear things up.” 

It’s a little ironic that Sam would choose those words, because Bucky wants more than anything for things to be clear, to be straightforward and easy. It’s essentially what he’s been striving for this whole time, but everything is still so dense and muddled. 

How does he even begin to put together what happened? The facts are simple enough, but Sam already knows the facts and they’re not what he’s asking for so Bucky has to pull himself away from trying to organize an explanation that had already started to sound like a mission report. 

Sam will want to know what he was feeling, what he was thinking. He’ll probably ask eventually, then say it’s okay when Bucky can’t put it into words. But Bucky doesn’t know, doesn’t remember what he was feeling. He doesn’t know what he’s feeling _now_. And Sam just watched him fall apart, unable to accomplish something so simple as breathing, so how can he expect Bucky to separate just one part of his mind and explain it? 

Something must start to show on his face, because Sam holds up a hand. “Hey, it’s cool, man. How about this—who hit first, and why?” 

It’s a ridiculous question, because Sam already knows who hit first; there’s no way Steve would hit him for anything but self-defense. But even with the patronizing tone Bucky hears under his words, Sam's done it again. He could have just told Bucky to take his time, start at the beginning, could have asked him what he was thinking, but instead he asked something concrete and answerable. 

So Bucky can answer the question. The words are there, after a moment, though he dislikes whatever it is that pulls at him when he thinks about saying them aloud. He doesn’t know if he can do this, the swimming through feelings, sorting out what thoughts are relevant then grasping at his vocabulary to try and spit it all out somewhat coherently, hoping that somehow Sam will comprehend, when it’s been so damn hard with Steve. 

But then, Sam sees him in a completely different way. Bucky doesn’t know why Sam’s able to understand like he does, if there’s a reason—his experiences, a natural intuition, the simple fact that he hadn’t spent most of life with Bucky. But Sam will probably understand his words better than Steve, and if Bucky doesn’t ever try to make himself heard, nothing will ever change. 

“I did. I was mad.” 

“At Steve?” 

Bucky flinches from the idea, even though it’s true in at least some way. And he’s been angry at Steve before, but he wouldn’t take it out on him like that, not by attacking him. 

“Yes.” _Shit._ “No, that’s…not…” He digs his knuckles into the space between his eyes. 

Sam doesn’t wait long, not like the vast silences that Steve lets him have. “Do you know what you were mad about?” 

_This shitty life I’ve been told I have to fix even though nothing’s working and everything’s broken and I never wanted any of this and I just want to stop fucking fighting a losing battle every day._

“No.” 

“Okay. So you were angry, and Steve was there.” 

Bucky nods. 

“Did he say something?” 

Bucky almost says yes, but realizes he doesn’t know if that’s true. He’s pretty sure they’d been talking, or Steve had been talking, but all his memory is giving him is them being in the room together and his stepping forward to throw his fist at the wall before it blanks out. And part of him knows it’s different from all the other memories he’s lost or can’t find, the ones from before that make up who he is, but can’t help but take on the same amount of blame for not being able to see them. 

“I don’t know.” 

Sam’s quiet and Bucky wants to look over at him but can’t, because if what he sees reminds him of Steve at all, he’s afraid something inside him will collapse again. 

“Do you know why you hit him?” 

He does and he doesn’t. The reason has no explanation. “I punched a wall.” 

“A wall?” 

Bucky nods. “And…” He gestures at his human hand, the only one he could hurt. “And he…” “

Stopped you.” 

He nods again. 

Sam relaxes against the wall. “So you’re mad about something and taking it out on the wall, Steve gets in the way and it gets redirected at him.” 

There’s something missing, but isn’t it enough of a betrayal that Bucky prefers talking these things out with Sam rather Steve? All the little ways he’s felt it, the fact that he knows he sometimes gets angry with Steve anyway—even if he felt up to trying to describe it, that stays inside him. Because that might mean some part of him wanted to hurt Steve, felt good about it, and that’s something he needs to shove away, push to the back of his mind with everything else keeping the Soldier locked away. 

So he just nods. 

Sam nods, too, like he understands. “I think Steve gets that it wasn’t really about him. From what I can tell, at least. But he’s still kinda beatin’ himself up over it.” 

Bucky can’t stop the bitterness that wells up at that, because of course Steve would try and take responsibility for it, like he’s to blame. Bucky really can’t handle trying to get it through Steve’s head that he didn’t do anything wrong and this really isn’t about Steve. But then, Bucky’s also mad at himself because that’s not really true; so many things are about Steve. So much of Bucky revolves around him. 

“I’m sorry,” Bucky says, but winces, face showing the most expression—aside from shades of anger—it has since he has no idea when, because he doesn’t mean it the same way anymore, not in the way he’s been repeating to Steve for days, But Sam doesn’t know that ( _does he?_ ), and Bucky can’t imagine explaining the whole thing, and it’s definitely not what he wanted to say. 

“Hey, you got nothing to be sorry for.” 

Like he didn’t know that was coming. 

“And I bet on Nana’s apple muffins if you say it to Steve he’ll tell you the same thing.” 

It’s utterly ridiculous, but Bucky finally has something to say: “They were good.” 

And then Sam is smiling at him so big and bright that Bucky can’t help but mirror him, even if not half as vividly. 

“I’ll be sure not to tell her that, or else she’ll send over a moving truck full of ‘em.” 

Bucky’s smiled before, of course, but it still feels unnatural on his face, even when it’s not forced, so much that when he realizes he’s doing it, it’s gone immediately and he’s instead left with a sense of bewilderment. So he holds on to the moment as best he can, trying to memorize how joking and enjoyment feel, the lightness of them, but they’re too quickly drowned, crushed by the heaviness of the day. 

“So what were you doing on the roof?” 

He hadn’t been doing anything, really. “Thinking.” Despite how much he’d wanted not to. Most days he wants nothing more than to shut his brain off, but he can’t figure out a way to do it that isn’t permanent. And he’d (finally) had that argument with himself. 

“About what?” 

_killing myself because I won’t ever stop being a murderer I won’t ever stop seeing all the blood hearing them scream feeling their bones snap it won’t ever end and I can’t keep pulling myself up you don’t know how hard this is I’m so tired it shouldn’t be this fucking hard to just exist I’m falling apart I don’t want to do this anymore please I need help_ “Guilt.” 

Sam makes a small humming noise and doesn’t say anything at first. He does this whenever Bucky’s said something important, something about what’s going on in his head that he’d be hesitant to talk to Steve about. Like he’s choosing his words, and it always makes Bucky’s gut churn with what he’s learned to call anticipation or maybe even a step up—nervousness. Because he recognizes that Sam is smart about this kind of thing, smarter than Nat, even, because she can read minds in a way that lets her use people, but Sam does it in a way that makes people see things about themselves. So Bucky will pretty much trust that whatever Sam says is at least mostly truth. 

“I’ve met a lot of people dealing with guilt. They feel like they can’t ever get away from their pasts, like the things they feel bad about just keep following them around.” 

He knows Sam’s watching him. It makes him uncomfortable in the same way as when he thinks about how Sam seems perfectly able to pilot Bucky’s fucked-up mind when Bucky’s barely capable of stepping outside. It would probably be a good time to put into practice what Natasha had talked about, how he’s allowed to ask for things, and that includes asking someone to stop doing something. Which, rationally, he knows, _of course_ he knows, but doing is so incredibly different than knowing. 

And a small part of him hopes that maybe Sam will be able to see more of him just by looking. Bucky’s able to tell plenty about a person by watching them. Maybe it helps Sam read people. 

“Not that I’m trying to say you’re just going through the same things as anyone else who’s ever faced trauma.” (Bucky still can’t put that word to anything that happened, can’t use it in relation to himself, but he’s stopped flinching at it.) “But it’s not uncommon for those same people to also feel they deserve having to carry around all that guilt and shame because they feel like they need some kind of punishment. So they’re haunted by all these thoughts and memories and they hate it and want to feel better, but there’s no way that can happen if they’re still hanging on to the idea that they need to atone for those things they feel guilty over.” 

Bucky thinks if he didn’t feel so wholly pinned where he is, he’d be running. As it is, he’d afraid he might vomit or start struggling for air again. It’s like he’d been hiding these things away until he could try and understand them, keeping them where nobody else would see because it’s complicated and messy and he didn’t want to burden anyone with sorting it out for him. So he’d been building a wall he thought was sturdy enough but Sam just plucked one brick from the bottom and wrecked the whole thing and put all of Bucky’s shit on tidy display right in front of him where he can’t help but see how it makes sense. 

The week before, he’d heard Stark utter a phrase he couldn’t believe was still in use. 

“Sucker punch.” 

The way Sam’s laughter sputters out, Bucky can tell he’s caught off guard. So is Bucky, but only because Sam’s laughing at all; he hadn’t meant it to be funny. Sam’s still smiling when he asks, “Guess I don’t really need to ask if any of that was relevant, huh?” 

Bucky can’t tell if he really wants an answer, so he says nothing. 

“See, here’s the thing.” Sam’s voice is serious again, cautious, soft, slow, and Bucky’s heart starts pounding. “If you’re looking for atonement, you’re never gonna get rid of that guilt, because you’re waiting on forgiveness from people who can’t give it to you.” 

_Because they’re dead. I killed them._

“You have to forgive _yourself_ , and that…well, that’s a pretty damn hard thing to do. And even once you do it, you’ll have to keep doing it over and over. But it’s worth it. It’s so worth it. Because having all that weight on your shoulders? It takes away your life, man. It takes away so much from you.” 

Bucky closes his eyes. He’s crying again, knows it because of the tears that run down into his lips and drop off his jaw, but he doesn’t feel it anymore, not really. What he feels is a gaping hollowness. Like he’s an empty husk of a person. 

“You have to start believing you deserve a better life, Bucky. Give yourself a second chance. Because once you can do that, once you can say ‘I deserve better than this, I’m worth more than this', about anything, then you can say it about something else, and then something else, and one day you’ll get to a point where forgiving yourself isn’t as impossible as it used to be. 

“Look, I’m not gonna lie to you and tell you it’ll happen anytime soon, or that you’re not gonna feel like shit while you’re trying to get there, because it’s hard. And it gets pretty damn painful. But as long as you keep wanting it and you keeping fighting to get there, it’s gonna happen.” 

This, this is what Bucky had been feeling, leaning over the roof, trying to tell himself he wanted to live. He was aching for a second chance when he’d done nothing to deserve one. Except Sam’s telling him he does, and Bucky can’t accept that. That can’t be the truth. He doesn’t deserve to just start over, pretend none of it ever happened. 

He scrubs at the wetness on his face, hoping it’s stopped for good this time. “How can that…be okay?” 

“What, feeling better?” 

It’s not quite what Bucky means—he’s still stuck on the idea of ignoring his past—but he nods anyway. 

“Well is this okay? All this?” Sam gestures a hand at Bucky without moving toward him. “You hate being asked if you’re okay because the answer’s always no, right?” 

Bucky gets the sense Sam’s known this for a while, has been waiting for the right time to use it. 

“So if you’re not okay now and you don’t think you’re the kind of person who’ll ever get to be okay, why does it matter? If you’ve made your peace with it and you can’t change it, then why do you feel like you do when Steve asks if you’re okay? Because I think you know.” 

_I want to be okay._

He’s exhausted. He feels dried up inside, still cavernous and hollowed out. Like he could sleep right where he was sitting. There’s a sense of being exposed that he doesn’t think he’s ever felt; there’s nothing in his memory at this point to compare it to. 

The maze inside his head had been wrecked the moment he turned on Steve, and Bucky hadn’t really been trying to put things back together. He might have cleaned up a few things, earlier on the roof, but even though he’d panicked and started scrambling to cover everything back up where he wouldn’t have to look at any of it, Sam had known just what to fish out and bring to light. And Bucky’s just tired. He’d been so many places today. 

“Bed.” He feels like it’ll be one of those times when sleep is actually restful. Those are starting to be normal. And he knows he never gave Sam any kind of answer, but Bucky’s silence and then request (demand) for them to stop talking are all Sam needs. 

“Yeah, bet it’s calling your name.” Sam’s playing along; Bucky can tell he doesn’t want to leave from the barely held back sigh and the way he looks away, how his shoulders drop. Like he’s giving up. Or like Bucky’s giving up? Bucky’s too drained to think about it. 

“But hey,” Sam says and looks back at him. “Anytime, okay?” 

He says it every time Bucky brings up something serious, regardless of its importance, and every time, he waits for a reply. So Bucky nods, and Sam tells him to get some sleep and leaves. Bucky wonders if he meant to say goodbye to Steve. 

He walks over to the hallway leading to his and Steve’s rooms, completely steady but feeling almost like he just came out of cryo, like his limbs aren’t fully there yet. He stops and listens to Steve’s music. Even now that he can hear it properly, he doesn’t know what it is. (Steve jumps back and forth through the decades with music and movies, trying to soak up as much as possible, and Bucky doesn’t even try to keep up with him anymore. He doesn’t mind the new stuff, and there’s more than enough of that to discover.) 

He has a choice. He’s better with choices, doesn’t really get stuck so much anymore, but right now, there’s a very blatant ‘one or the other’ scenario in front of him. His room or Steve’s. He could go through his door on one side of the hall and close the door loud enough that Steve would hear and know he was okay. Or he could stand outside Steve’s half-open door. What he’d do there, Bucky doesn’t know. He definitely can’t drag himself through another conversation. 

But Steve had walked away. Bucky hadn’t had to witness him breaking himself down with worry trying to find answers to problems Bucky didn’t even think could be fixed. And yes, he might have only left because Sam told him to, Bucky realizes that, but Bucky’s also getting better at seeing motivation. Why people do things that don’t seem to make sense. (Steve is a constant exercise in this, when it comes to Bucky.) And he can see that there has to be some kind of trust in leaving Bucky with Sam. Or faith, confidence, something like that. After Bucky had been running away from him for the past week and had fallen apart when he finally tried to talk. 

If he chooses his own door now, they’ll ignore this in the morning. Steve, at least, will pretend it never happened and act like Bucky can’t see the worried looks. And Bucky may or may not be able to talk to him. He doesn’t know; trying to predict how he’ll feel about anything is precarious. So he can’t just leave it. Not while he can still grasp at some of what Sam had stirred up in him, making him so desperately want to believe that something could actually change. 

So he walks, briefly shuts his eyes when he steps past his door, and stands in Steve’s doorway with his hands deep in his pockets. Steve’s drawing on his bed, leaned on the headboard with most of one leg hanging off the side of the bed. Or, he had been drawing, but it seems like he’d been staring at his sketchbook for a while. It takes him a matter of seconds to sense Bucky, and less than that to toss the sketchbook aside, switch the music off, and start to stand but awkwardly push himself back down again. 

Bucky wishes Steve had left the music on because he hadn’t realized how much he was still lacking for words. Now Steve’s looking at him expectantly and Bucky’s not even angry this time because he can’t talk, he’s angry because he dragged himself into this thinking he could do it. But he’s here because of Sam, so he stares at the floor and tries to think about everything Sam said to him. There’d been a lot about forgiving himself and fighting with Steve but not apologizing to him because of muffins. He was angry and guilty and Sam had tried to take that from him. He _had_ taken some of it, because Sam wanted him to be okay, that was the big thing, Sam and Steve wanted him to be okay and Sam had punched it out of him that he also wanted it and you know what, Sam? 

“Thank you.” 

And maybe he hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but that’s okay. Because Steve looks confused but he’s smiling a little and Bucky thinks that yeah, maybe grateful is something he could be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I may be taking liberties with Sam’s experience with playing therapist, but then, he’s an outsider to Bucky. He knows a fair deal about pain and PTSD, and Bucky knows that on some level. It’s just easier to listen to Sam and actually take in his words than when they’re coming from Steve, because everything about Steve is a mess in Bucky’s head.
> 
> But also I can't help it if Sam Wilson is basically perfection. Bless you, Sam Wilson.


	12. Summer

It doesn’t catapult him back to the beginning—the emotional wreckage, losing his speech again, the panic attacks. (When Sam had called them that, Bucky had balked at the term and the very concept, but when he turned to tell Sam to fuck his panic, he’d seen caution in Sam’s entire body and something in his eyes that Bucky can’t convince himself wasn’t fear, and he’d deflated and almost had another one right then and there, because that wasn’t who he wanted to be anymore.) 

The internet has a lot to say about relapsing, but Sam says he should think of it as more like stumbling. 

(Bucky stumbles a lot.) 

(Bucky falls flat on his fucking face a lot.) 

His speech goes back to where it’d been fairly quickly, though the only complete sentences he can say are shorter than they used to be. He mostly still has to string the whole thing together in his head first. Sometimes the problem is as big as thinking it’s impossible to put what he’s thinking into words at all and sometimes it’s as small as forgetting a term. The things he’ll have to grasp at and the things he’ll just know seem so random. Some days he won’t know what to call the piece of clothing that goes on the top part of his body or what he’s doing when he’s putting water in his mouth and swallowing it, but that same day he’ll know the exact brand of milk they have in the fridge and he can tell Steve he looks especially pensive. 

Because he does, tonight. They’re on the couch watching a movie, something from Steve’s fucking _enormous_ list that he’s actually made a surprising amount of progress on. It has cowboys and ridiculously fake shooting and women with their breasts pushed up so much it has to be uncomfortable. Bucky’s not really following the story, but he’s pretty sure Steve isn’t either, because he’s mostly watching Bucky. 

Steve has his feet up on the table in front of them and Bucky’s lying down with his legs over Steve’s lap. Steve had at first rested his hands on top of Bucky’s legs, and Bucky had withstood for all of a few seconds before a loud “no” came bursting out of him. The immediate need to apologize to Steve and ask as best he could in his faltering way to please not put his hands on top of him like that, left Bucky feeling bad enough he’d pulled his legs as close to himself as he could, fitting as much of himself as possible on a single couch cushion. It had taken a few minutes of back and forth between them of Bucky saying he really was comfortable like that and Steve saying he really was fine with Bucky’s legs wherever he wanted them for Bucky to stretch out again, though not until several minutes into the film. 

He craves these little points of contact, and the state of mind he has to get to in order to tolerate them. Sometimes even Steve standing too close feels invasive and stifling, but sometimes he’ll be the one to reach out and grab Steve’s hand for a moment, or run a hand through his hair. It’s something he can both give to Steve and take for himself. He’s tried hugging Steve, trying to get back to where they’d been, where he could have Steve’s lips on his skin and feel maybe not safe but the closest he thinks he’ll ever be again, but it had only felt okay until had Steve snapped out of his shock and started to hug him back. Bucky had all but shoved him away and they’d both started apologizing, so hugging was added to the disappointingly numerous list of things Bucky should be able to do but can’t. 

Steve’s been glancing over at him on and off since the movie started. It makes Bucky hyperaware of his own face, his eye movements, his breathing, but not uncomfortable enough to tell him to stop. He’s pretty sure Steve just _likes_ looking at him, because his eyes could never seem to settle in one place when they were close enough Bucky could feel the warmth of his exhales. Forever roaming over whatever exposed skin he saw, climbing back to bore into Bucky’s own eyes, then leaving again to map out every piece Bucky could stand to let him have. But when he stops looking back at the television and is only watching Bucky, it’s too much scrutiny to endure for long, and Bucky has to glance back at him. Steve quickly looks away, down at where his hands are almost touching Bucky’s calves, smiling like he’s embarrassed to have been caught, and apologizes softly. That’s when Bucky says it, that Steve looks especially pensive. 

Steve looks back up at him. “Yeah?” 

“Yeah.” 

And for a moment Bucky thinks Steve is going to ask him why he thinks that and he’ll have to explain the slight curve in his eyebrows, the set of his jaw, the way he holds his head. Or maybe Steve will make up some bullshit excuse that’ll make Bucky feel like a nuisance for pointing it out in the first place. But neither happens; Steve looks back at his hands and somehow pensive now looks concerned, which means Bucky is struggling not to seize up. 

Except he can’t help it—all his muscles are tense from the idea that he’s screwed something up again and he couldn’t just let them have this one night of normalcy. And Steve, however lost he may get when he tries to understand Bucky mentally, he sometimes feels perfectly tuned in to Bucky physically. He can sense from just Bucky’s hand whether he’s okay with having Steve’s in it, so of course he notices that Bucky’s gone rigid, not quite breathing deeply enough to be natural. 

“No, hey, it’s nothing to worry about. It’s not important.” 

There’s the bullshit, even though his smile reaches his eyes. Bucky wants to relax, breathe out long and deep and go back to pretending to watch the movie. But this is about him. Steve was lost in thought staring at him and then worried about something, something in particular and Bucky can’t even imagine just letting that sit and fester, letting Steve internalize it while he doesn’t have to do a thing. 

But he can’t just tell Steve all that; he wouldn’t be that accusatory even if he could wrestle that idea into a sentence. And trying to go the route of ‘I want to know what’s on your mind’ would only lead to a headache of a conversation where Steve will say that Bucky has enough to worry about already and Bucky will say that it’s not fair to Steve if Bucky’s the only one who ever gets to vent. Steve will say he vents to Sam, it’s really fine, Bucky will say not to treat him like he can’t handle it, he’ll be fine, and they’ll be back at the beginning. They’ve done it before. 

So he’s stuck just staring at Steve, increasingly agitated at how his smile is fading and being replaced by that worried look again, and Bucky decides that maybe he _can’t_ handle it, maybe he should just let Steve have this one and he can feed the guilt to the Soldier to keep him sated. He starts counting down from ten, still unable to take his eyes from Steve’s, ready to force his gaze back to the screen at zero, but Steve starts talking when he hits four. 

“It’s just something Sam mentioned.” He shakes his head and says, softer, “I don’t even think he meant to…” He exhales, shoulders sagging. He looks back at Bucky for a moment, then reaches over, carefully not touching Bucky, and pauses the movie. 

Bucky’s nervous, he can recognize that as a truth because he knows that tight but unsettled feeling in his stomach and his chest. But he’s not going to tell Steve to let him have a moment to count and breathe because he’ll take it to mean he should stop entirely. So he says nothing. 

“It just made me think that…I don’t know, the way you were always reading everything you could find about you, from before,” _before before before I died before I killed you before all those things nobody wants to acknowledge but I need to_ “but you sometimes didn’t like it when I called you Bucky, and I just…” His fingers are toying with each other, tracing over knuckles and veins. 

Bucky knows part of Steve still wants to treat him like he’s fragile, to hold him up gently, perfectly balanced so he won’t splinter, and Bucky can’t truly fault him for that. He knows his mind is deceptively glasslike—even when it seems free of cracks, the slightest amount of pressure in just the right place will make the whole thing shatter. Bucky’s fallen apart, retreated into himself, and taken it out on Steve too many times to deny that parts of him are grossly frail. 

“If it’s because…with your memory, and all…” 

It strikes Bucky that this is genuinely hard for Steve to say, whether for fear of his reaction or because he also is struggling with the right words. And he thinks he understands now, maybe a little, why Steve always just sits there, not saying anything, just waiting for Bucky to finish trying to speak. He doesn’t understand at all what Steve’s trying to tell him, but he’s too overwhelmed to do anything but let Steve have his time. To interrupt or try to take the conversation from him, to _guess_ at what he’s getting to, it doesn’t even seem like an option. 

Steve laughs a little, shaking his head and glancing up at the ceiling. “I could be really off base here, but…Don’t feel like you have to be that guy, okay?” 

Something icy shoots down the length of his body. Steve is looking at him so straightforwardly it’s like he can see into Bucky’s head, but the little movements around his lips say he’s on the verge of chewing on them. 

“I mean, things are different now, you don’t have to…try to be someone you don’t feel like you are. I’m not the same guy I was back then, either.” 

Except he is. Steve is still the same guy who wears honor and bravery like tooth and nail. They might have put him on a pedestal, given him the chance to lead, but inside he’s still just the guy who can’t not pick a fight when he sees injustice. 

And Bucky? He has a tenuous grasp of both who he is and and who he was. He’s managed to connect the two, to finally fit them together and get the memories to settle into a place where he can accept it as truth that he is James Buchanan ‘Bucky’ Barnes, but he still doesn’t feel like he knows who that is. The records…there’d been almost a script, a template of who to be, but he is adrift in the present with no words to define personhood. 

“Should I stop talking?” 

Steve’s voice is too small in that way that means he’s already resigned himself to having crossed a line. Bucky shakes his head. He wants Steve to talk, not just out of some sense of duty, but because maybe Steve knows more than him about who he’s supposed to be, who he _can_ be. 

“It’s just…you shouldn’t have to tie yourself to the past. You’re allowed to be somebody different.” 

“I don’t know.” 

Bucky’s looking away, gaze focused on the edge of the table, but he knows Steve is squinting a little, eyes pointed down like he does when he thinks about Bucky’s words. 

“You don’t know who you are?” 

He hadn’t even been able to trust that the body he inhabited belonged with the name that was supposed to be his until recently. It was still a strained link. What that a good enough answer? Can he just say he’s Bucky Barnes and not have to think about who Bucky Barnes is? 

He shakes his head. 

“You don’t have to. I don’t think you have to figure it out all at once.” 

Steve looks away, focusing on the middle space between him and the television and folding his arms over his chest. “Or that’s what I tell myself. Waking up in this century, it…I still feel like I don’t belong sometimes. World’s changed so much, I had to act like a whole different person just to get by, and now I don’t know if it’s an act anymore or if this is just me now.” 

There’s a jarring disconnect in what Bucky’s seeing, because one part of him feel incredulity flooding his mind, the same kind as when Sam had laid him bare, that Steve thinks he’s changed at all and can’t see how he still might as well be built from sunshine and brass knuckles, but another part knows that the Steve he remembers never had this doubt, never showed anyone the weight he carried. 

Steve half-smiles and looks over at Bucky. “So it’s kinda like getting to know each other all over again, huh?” 

Bucky chokes on air and jerks his legs back so he can sit up, coughing. Steve has his legs off the table and his body turned towards Bucky so fast it’s almost comical, especially with the way he makes to reach out but clenches his hands into fists and jerks them back. He’s saying Bucky’s name and asking if he needs water, but Bucky’s not really listening because those words…Steve had said almost that exact some thing in 1935. ’34? No, it had to be ’35. 

God, that fucking summer, when everything about their friendship that had been shifting and vibrating and lurching had rammed together and left them helplessly awestruck. Every time they’d catch each other’s eyes and lingers a little too long, the hugs that were a little too tight, all those times when they’d shared a bed and would just talk until they fell asleep with their faces too close together, that had all stopped being muted, tense, wondering, and started being alive, thrilling, _knowing_. They were teenage boys with a lifetime of friendship only just then realizing they were things they hadn’t discovered, things that they _could_ discover. 

And the memory is so damn vivid, of his arms around Steve, Steve’s hands on his shoulders. Steve’s laughing, they’re _both_ laughing, even though he’s kissing his way up Steve’s neck, biting his jaw playfully, and Steve is smiling even bigger. It’s too hard to kiss someone when neither of you can straighten your lips for two damn seconds, so Steve just rests his forehead on Bucky’s, mouth close enough Bucky feels his breath when he says it feels like they’re getting to know each other all over again. 

Bucky doesn’t want it. Now, there’s nothing left inside him of this kid who could swallow his guilt easy as breathing and pull Steve close to him with absolute devotion. And he did feel guilty, always had, for being the Steve shone his light on. He meant it, he’d always meant it that anyone could see how brilliant Steve was if they just got to know him. But after that year and the ones that followed, even if they never talked about it, never gave it a name, even if they both had dates, it was always Bucky that Steve turned back to. He’d push away possibilities of a perfect future for their dirty little secret, a dream of a life they could never have. And it was selfish, so damn selfish, but God damn him if Bucky didn’t love things that way. 

No, he doesn’t want that. Doesn’t want to be that kid. 

“Please be different.” 

His own words bring the world back into place, slide colors back where they should be, and Bucky knows he’s just been sitting there on the edge of the couch, somewhat hunched over. But he’s calm. Shaky, jarred, but by his standards, calm. 

“Different?” 

He looks over at Steve. 

“Was that…directed at me?” 

He’s so hesitant with the question, so careful with his inflection, that it’s obvious he’s hiding an emotional response. Bucky wants to explain, wishes he hadn’t said it aloud, not yet, but he can’t like and say he meant it about himself. That’s not the whole truth. So he stares at Steve while he tries to figure this out, until Steve drops his gaze. 

“I…uh…” 

“No, no, no, that…” Bucky reaches over and grabs Steve’s hand with his flesh one, keeping his metal arm close to himself. He doesn’t watch for Steve’s reaction. “It’s…what you said, that you feel, um…” He shakes his head, as if it’ll knock loose the static. “When you woke up.” 

He looks up at Steve, who doesn’t look upset that Bucky told him to be different, or shocked that Bucky was still holding on to him. Just confused. 

“I said I felt like I had to be someone different.” 

Bucky’s nodding before Steve finishes his sentence. “Yeah.” And for half a moment he thinks that’s it, they’re done, Steve gets it, but he realizes he hasn’t explained a damn thing, he’s just repeated himself. He looks away, and doesn’t realize he’s curling in on himself again until Steve’s thumb runs a single line over Bucky’s hand. Bucky looks at the joined hands, looks up at Steve, squeezes once, breathes. 

“The…the memory, _my_ memory isn’t why…” He lets out a short huff of frustration. “You said I’m allowed not to…be when… _shit_ …a-allowed to be someone different.” 

Steve nods, small and cautious. “Are you?” 

“Yes. I’m not then. _Fuck_. I’m not him. That was him and you before. Before the you…you before…” He shuts his eyes, breathes, feels the subtle motion of Steve’s thumb again, wets his lips, starts again. 

“That can’t be true anymore. It’s memory. Different. I…Both have to be different because if one isn’t when the other remembers he went to be…uh, meant to… _fucking shit_ I’m not-” 

“Buck, it’s okay.” Bucky isn’t looking at Steve anymore because it’s that word; nothing is okay, not like this. “I think I get it.” 

He doesn’t want to hope, because he knows how it’ll feel to fall even this short distance if Steve can’t understand this one thing, but it’s there anyway. It’ll be like losing your balance off a fallen tree instead of a tightrope. It won’t hurt much, but he still doesn’t want it to happen. 

“Back before,” Steve says, “Steve and Bucky back then, they belonged together. But you’re not that Bucky anymore, you’re different, so you want me to be different also.” 

He only barely makes it a question, he’s so unsure, but all Bucky can do is stare, wide-eyed, because it’s the first time Steve’s been able to understand him like this, when he’s getting more and more stressed out over trying to explain something important and his language starts slipping. And the hope that he’d wanted to block out so it wouldn’t unbalance him suddenly feels like a lifeline and he wonders why he ever doubted he could walk a tightrope. 

He leans in and kisses Steve, and for a moment it’s bliss, it feels right and familiar and _good_ , but the way they’re sitting is too awkward, half turned away, knees pressing against each other, Bucky pinning one of Steve’s hands with his own; Steve is off-balanced with fast Bucky moves and unthinkingly braces himself on Bucky’s metal arm. 

Bucky jumps back immediately, rips his hand away, and turns away, arm pulled in tight against him. 

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, sounding as out of breath as Bucky feels—ridiculous for a kiss that maybe lasted a second. 

Bucky shakes his head emphatically; he’s pretty certain he can’t say anything aloud right now. He’s gripping the edge of he couch and notices his leg bouncing. It’s a nervous tic he’s seen countless people do without realizing, but not him, and he makes himself stop. But then there’s no outlet for the rush in his veins. He doesn’t know what it’s from: kissing Steve without really deciding to, or from Steve’s hand on his arm—Steve doesn’t touch that arm, he just doesn’t, not after Bucky told him not to both at the beginning with harsh words hiding fear, and later with something calmer, with Natasha’s voice echoing things like autonomy and boundaries in his head. 

There’s too much. There’s too much to think about, and Steve is still sitting next to him, watching him. Waiting for something? Bucky looks over and Steve’s looking at him with something like concern, but the way his hands are fidgeting says he’s lost. Bucky turns back away. 

He can’t talk. Not tonight. Not anymore. He’s tired. Steve had understood him and that had felt so good, and he wants to feel that moment again, wishes he hadn’t acted on impulse and ruined yet another good thing. He wants…can’t he just not think about it? Sam told him to focus on the good. He also told Bucky not to shut things out, not to do what he’s getting better and better at and tuck them away in the back of his mind where he may or may not deal with or even think about them later. But. He’s tired. 

So he shoves the bad away and thinks about that single moment until he’s calm, and he knows he’s probably not smiling, but he’s _together_ and it’ll show on his face. Sam says he shows more emotion these days, and even if he can’t feel it himself, he knows Sam’s right because the way everyone acts, the looks on their faces when they make eye contact with him, has changed so much from when he first came back. And when he turns to look at Steve again, Steve smiles and tries to hide relief. Bucky lies down, pulling his feet up close to his body and staring at the screen in front of him. Steve watches for a moment and Bucky wishes he knew what his face was really showing, but Steve starts the movie again and sits back, and Bucky puts his legs back across his lap. 

* 

Steve is…tenser, after. Like instead of taking a load off his mind, telling Bucky he was free to reinvent himself had only added problems. Maybe it might have helped if Bucky hadn’t told him to be someone different. 

He knows he explained and he knows Steve understands him (or he says he does, and nothing about him says he’s lying, but a sick little part of Bucky can’t be sure of any truths when it comes to Steve, because he doesn’t want to believe he’d ever lie), but Steve is quieter. He gets lost in thought more often, though not like before, when Bucky was more bomb than fuse and not even aware enough of himself to know it. Then, Bucky remembers, Steve would stand in front of the large window overlooking the city, hands in his pockets, stance tense, for long minutes, sometimes surprised to find Bucky watching him from across the room. Now, he’ll watch out the windows from anywhere. It seems less intentional, especially in the restlessness of his hands. They fidget, fingertips pressing against one another or following the edge of a table or couch cushion, fiddling with the strings of a sweatshirt or with Bucky’s hair (for only seconds before he’d realized and jerked his hand away; Bucky had pulled it back before Steve could even start to voice his apology). 

He has an idea, but it means talking to the AI, which feels too much like talking to a voice in his head. It got easier when they worked it out so that it adjusts, around Bucky, to seemingly emanate from a specific point instead of encompassing the room, but it still unnerves him sometimes. But he doesn’t want to just go rifling through Steve’s things; he knows too much about invasion to not allow Steve privacy. 

So he asks where it is, and the next time he sees Steve tapping an unknown rhythm on his knee, he slips away to bring him his sketchbook and the thick pencil next to it. 

Steve goes still at first, but reaches out to take them even as he looks up from his seat by the window with a confused expression. 

“Your hands,” Bucky says. “All the…” He waves his own hands around in exaggerated motions, and Steve laughs and looks away, embarrassed. 

He can’t remember the last time he saw Steve draw. Even counting the one time he’d actually seen the sketchbook, Steve hadn’t been drawing in it, had in fact tossed it aside as soon as he saw Bucky. Like it was something he did only when Bucky wasn’t there. And Bucky’s always there. 

So he turns to leave, thinking maybe he’ll push himself a little today and go talk to Nat, but Steve’s “wait” makes him turn around. 

“Can I draw you?” 

Bucky doesn’t move for a second, frozen staring at Steve, and knows his face is showing surprise. But that expression—wide eyes, raised eyebrows—will also turn up on the faces of people growing nervous, and although he doesn’t know why he knows he doesn’t want Steve knowing he’s nervous. 

“Uh…” He looks around, slides his hands into his pockets and out again. “Yeah.” 

Steve smiles. 

“I should sit?” 

“Whatever you want,” Steve says. 

Bucky’s not sure if Steve’s doing that consciously anymore, making Bucky choose things and specifically using the word ‘want’ or ‘like’ or something of the kind, because he doesn’t think it’s the sort of thing normal people would struggle with. Telling Bucky he could sit or stand wherever he wanted was probably perfectly ordinary, didn’t warrant a second thought, but between them, it was something to be monitored. 

Except it’s rare for Bucky to freak out anymore over being handed the reigns to his own life, especially with the little things. So it doesn’t take him very long to make his way to the outrageously comfortable recliner, grabbing the TV remote on his way. He pauses, though, before turning it on, and looks to Steve. 

“You want me to…” 

“Pose?” 

Bucky nods. 

“No, just.” Steve shrugs. “Whatever feels natural.” He seems to realize his poor choice of words and quickly recovers. “Or, like how you’d be sitting if I weren’t here.” Bucky drops his gaze, not truly sure he understands. If Steve weren’t in the room, Bucky probably wouldn’t be, either. He doesn’t like having the TV on when he’s alone; it seems bigger and brighter and louder, so he sticks with his tablet. Steve doesn’t have the same problem, so he lets—practically _makes_ —Bucky pick what they watch. Bucky goes along with it, but almost always chooses something from Steve’s list. The only thing Steve’s ever objected to was one of the cooking shows Bucky’s been tearing through lately, and that simple complaint had thrilled Bucky, made him actually laugh. Not, like Steve thought, at him, but at how good it felt to have somebody finally express negativity towards him. Even though it had been just a gentle tease, it had made everything suddenly that much more believable. There was more truth in it. 

“Or,” Steve says, and Bucky’s jerked back to the present. Steve doesn’t look worried, so he wasn’t gone for very long. “Like if I were over there with you.” 

That makes a lot more sense. They’re always sitting close to each other or touching somehow, though it’s always on the couch. It’d be an awkward fit in the chair. He’d probably be mostly in Steve’s lap. 

Okay. 

He shifts so that he’s leaning on one armrest, legs pulled up beside him. Steve’s arm would probably be around his waist. Bucky’s not sure he’d be able to stand it for very long, Steve (inadvertently) holding him down, but like this, he can pretend it’s okay. He can rest his own arm across his stomach and pretend Steve is there with him. Thinking about Steve holding him is okay. Good, even. 

He pulls up the show he was in the middle of and manages to smile when he hears Steve scoff out a laugh. He keeps urging Bucky to try actually cooking something, joking about how all the culinary knowledge he’s picking up is being wasted on toast. The truth is embarrassing: Bucky can’t train himself from a television, and he doesn’t want Steve to see him fail at anything more than he already has, so his kitchen endeavors aren’t very grand. Maybe one day he’ll attempt something while Steve’s out, when he’s sure he’ll have the time to erase all evidence of the disastrous result. 

Usually Bucky’s fairly engaged when he’s watching, but right now he can feel Steve’s focus, can hear when his hand stops moving, see at the edge of his vision when he looks up and studies Bucky’s face, his body. It’s distracting, but not quite in the way as when he’d been lying on the couch that time. Bucky’s aware of the reason behind Steve’s scrutiny, and he’s extremely aware of how closely Steve has to be examining him. It doesn’t bother him. Or. It doesn’t bother him in a bad way. He’s had sex with Steve before, in another lifetime, and they’ve…had some heated moments in this one, so it’s not as if he’s never had Steve’s eyes on his body. 

And Steve’s drawn him before. He knows and trusts this to be true, even though he has no specific memory of it. It’s just something he feels, a sense memory, like the way he sometimes wakes up aching desperately for Steve’s arms around him, to be wrapped up in him, even knowing the panic it would set off in him if he woke up that way. His body remembers what it felt like. It remembers this, this put-upon nonchalance. Doing one thing and acting as if it holds his attention when really it’s a front; he’s posed for Steve’s eyes, his hands. It’s familiar. 

(His body remembers, and it _responds_ , because he’s still imagining sitting in Steve’s lap while he searches for memories. How often had he posed for Steve? Had he ever drawn Bucky nude? How many hours had Steve’s discerning eyes spent roaming every detail of his naked body? The idea of trusting Steve with something like that makes him flush with heat, but he forces it away. Maybe he’s responding that way because this would lead to sex in the past—it’s possible—but this is for Steve. Bucky doesn’t want it to go there. Not this time.) 

Steve shows him, when he’s done, and Bucky doesn’t recognize the person Steve’s drawn. It’s not who he sees in the mirror, who he feels moving his body through life, who’s behind the skin stretched too thin, and it’s certainly not who he keeps locked away deep in his mind. The person in the picture looks calm, almost serene. No pain in his eyes, open and quiet. No tightness in his jaw, loose and relaxed. Posture suggesting an ease Bucky can’t possibly be projecting. Is that what Steve sees? The person he thinks Bucky is? 

It’s wrong. He was wrong. 

He can only nod when Steve asks what he thinks, and he stands and leaves before Steve can find a way to ask him what’s wrong.


	13. I'm So Sorry

It helps, a little, to see Steve drawing. Like he’s done something right, solved a problem. Healed instead of hurt. If he doesn’t think about what Steve’s drawing, ignores is when he catches Steve glancing back and forth between Bucky and the page, then he can maintain some semblance of peace over having accomplished something. 

Steve doesn’t ask anymore what Bucky thinks of his work, and Bucky can’t make himself ask why, much less voice an unrequested opinion. To trust that Steve had worked out what bothered him would mean placing too much faith in something without a concrete basis in reality. Sometimes, in all the swirling nonsense that still makes up his world, it starts to seem like Steve is the one clear thing he has, bright and vivid and concise. But too often that faith comes crashing down around him, debris threatening to demolish his carefully constructed walls, walls he made for a reason. He can’t keep taking the risk of trusting Steve to catch him and understand him when every time Steve drops it he endangers the grip Bucky has on his demons. So as much as he wants to watch Steve work see the finished project, maybe even curl next to him while he’s drawing and go searching for that feeling he gets sometimes when he sees Steve’s smile up close, he doesn’t. And Steve lets him. Doesn’t question his distance. 

It doesn’t seem like Steve questions anything anymore. Not like before, when he was desperate for answers to everything about Bucky, answers Bucky couldn’t give. Steve used to ask him about so much, press for minutiae, worry over every change in Bucky’s habits, his routine. He’d call attention to every bit of progress, no matter how microscopic, no matter whether Bucky considered it progress. 

And now…now Steve lets him _get away with things_. When Bucky would spend the day in bed during those early months, Steve would ask if he could sit next to him, ask what was bothering him, almost beg for him to eat something. When Bucky finds himself lost in one of those days now, Steve only inserts himself long enough to put the chocolate covered pretzels on the table by the bed (they hold a decent rank on the list of things Bucky likes) and tell Bucky to let him know if there’s anything he can do, staying only long enough for an acknowledgement. And then he leaves, without any unnecessary touching or urging. 

When Bucky would disappear, needing solitude, Steve would always search him out. Bucky had worked out early on that he could instruct the AI to withhold his location, but he hadn’t been himself enough back then to know that Steve could only take that as a challenge, and would always seek him out, would never let him be alone for long. Now, Bucky can be gone for hours. He can come back to their floor late in the evening and see Steve for the first time that day and ignore how palpably he emits relief when he sees Bucky but doesn’t say anything. 

Before, whenever the glide of skin against skin would turn into the rasp of sandpaper and the pleasant warmth would become stifling heat and Bucky would go tense or flinch back and push Steve away, Steve was all concern, always wanting to know what triggered it, if Bucky wanted to talk about it (he never did, he wanted Steve to pin him down and fuck him raw, but he knew what would happen if he let himself go like that). Now, whenever Bucky gasps with what’s clearly not arousal, whenever he shoves Steve’s hands away with more force than needed because he just needs them off his body _now_ and feels like he’s barely holding back from pinning Steve in a hold neither of them would find comfortable, Steve not only does not complain, he does not ask for answers. He doesn’t ask Bucky to explain. He backs away, will sometimes ask “okay?”, and waits for Bucky’s next move. It’s frustrating. 

It’s frustrating, and lately, damn near infuriating. 

He’d had Steve against the wall, all teeth and hands and heat and Steve’s throat vibrating with moans as Bucky sucked marks onto it and his thigh pushing between Steve’s and _fuck it was good_ but in an instant so sudden he almost thinks there was an audible snap, it’s _too_ good, too much, and he’d broken away with frantic breaths, fingers running through his hair, eyes blinking rapidly, apologizing too much. And Steve just kept telling him it was okay, it was fine, not making any move to try and touch him, just standing there panting against the wall with his hair mussed and his pants tented, waiting for Bucky to decide what happened next. Saying nothing when Bucky walked away. Letting him go. 

He’s hurting Steve. Every time he disappears, every time he snaps at him, every time he talks to Sam but not him. Aborted attempts at sex. Gaping holes in his memory. Panic attacks. Nights he sleeps on the floor or the couch or his own bed. Volatile shifts in mood not even Bucky can predict. Every bad day is hurting Steve. Keeping him here and not in his apartment. Holding him back from missions. 

And Steve is never mad at him. He reacts. He gets appropriately admonishing whenever Bucky’s especially worked up and says something he’s not sure he means. Like a parent scolding a petulant child. He gets concerned on Bucky’s too-quiet days—quiet on the outside, too much going on inside. And gets something close to stern when Bucky will give up on talking for the rest of the day, when he decides he’s had enough and words just aren’t worth the trouble, it’s just not happening. (But Nat’s like that too. She only talks with him in Russian on his good days. When he’s struggling, she makes him push it out in English. Sometimes he hates it and walks away. But sometimes he doesn’t.) 

But Steve has never been angry at him. 

He should be. Doesn’t he have every right to be? Isn’t he just letting Bucky take up so much of his life, letting him dictate how things go? And fuck, it’s not like that’s how Bucky wants things to be; he wants so much to just unburden Steve from all his shit, but he can’t. Steve won’t let him. Steve says he wants Bucky here, even when Bucky is a knot of instability and caution. Steve lets Bucky step all over his life. 

That’s not the Steve he knew. This isn’t what he meant—a different Steve. He wants the guy who would never let anyone step on him. He wants Steve to fucking stand up for himself, to tell Bucky he shouldn’t have to put up with wondering whether Bucky’s going to disappear today, or start shaking out of nowhere, or lock himself in his room. Because he shouldn’t have to deal with any of it, but he does and he never complains. 

And Bucky feels like shit. 

He feels like he’s just waiting around for somebody to tell him off, to start yelling at him to get his life together and start acting like a regular fucking person. A normal human being. Sam isn’t going to do it, because every time Bucky tries talking to him, Sam keeps telling him how far he’s come, how much more he’s already acting like that person he wants to be, and he doesn’t understand that Bucky has no idea who he wants to be. Natasha won’t do it, because she has her memories of being where he is and opts for the path of deep-cutting empathy. 

And Steve will never do it, and Bucky can’t see why. 

So he yells at Steve instead. 

It always feels like he’s stepped out of his body, like he’s watching his own face contort with anger; that’s how numb he feels to his own thoughts. There’s no inward streaks of guilt when he tells Steve he’s a goddamned idiot for keeping Bucky around, that he’s a coward who won’t ever stick up for himself anymore. No remorse when he shoves Steve back and Steve lets him do it, bracing himself only enough to stop from falling over. 

He doesn’t retaliate. He won’t fight back. He just takes it, takes Bucky shouting abuse at him, not meeting Bucky’s eyes, with this look on his face that shows only staunch resignation. Like he’s rigidly determined that he just has to wait this out— _‘C’mon, Bucky, calm down, it’ll pass’_ —and they can go back to waiting for all the bitterness to build up again. 

That’s what it feels like: waiting. A trickle of an idea is back in his mind, the smallest of urges to leave. To give Steve his life back. Bucky’s not sure when the plan faded, or if maybe it had vanished entirely, but now it’s like he’s waiting for the right moment, for things to reach a critical point, for the best opportunity. For something. And maybe it won’t come; maybe he’s waiting for nothing. Maybe he’s just angry. Sam talks about the extremes of emotions and how it doesn’t always have to be all or nothing, and maybe this is like that. 

But the idea that they’d both be better off, maybe even happier if he left doesn’t grow weaker as he and Steve keep stringing amicable days together. But it also doesn’t grow stronger when he gets pissed again and they revisit arguments they haven’t had in months. It just idles, gathering what could either be dust or momentum. Bucky isn’t sure; he has trouble with the concept of progress.


	14. Polaroid

He doesn’t deserve Steve. He can’t shake that thought, even after all this time. He doesn’t even know how long it’s been, how long he’s been living there. He knows it’s been more than a year, remembers there’d been a celebration about him, for him, mixing the occasions of his birthday and him making it through a year ( _without killing anyone without turning into the murderous monster he’s still stifling down inside himself_ ), and it had been a good day; he’d breathed through the nervousness of having everyone’s attention on him, all so expectant, he’d said ‘thank you’ and meant it, he’d lingered and had cake and he’d talked to them (and with how close Steve stayed, Bucky wondered how much everyone else knew about their relationship. It was probably obvious, but he still doesn’t trust himself to judge something like that). He’d smiled a lot, so much more than normal, but had gotten that lost, shaky, apprehensive feeling sooner than he’d actually wanted to, and Steve was in tune enough to his state of mind that he’d started making their goodbyes before Bucky had to even try to say something about it. 

How long ago was that? He’s fairly good at knowing the date, but he still tucks away unimportant things and they sometimes blur along the edges. When he’d told Sam about how he can set information aside in his head, can cordon off things he doesn’t want to deal with or think about, Sam had talked about compartmentalization. (Bucky still doesn’t know what the look on his face meant when he’d told him he does the same with the Soldier, keeps him locked up in his own compartment, so he’s never brought up that he can still feel him rattling his cage. Not when Steve still doesn’t believe him after so long.) 

He’s not compartmentalizing the passing of time, though, so he’s not sure why he doesn’t know how long he’s been here. Even if someone told him the exact day he started living here, the first few weeks (or even months), are so out of focus it’s like watching a television screen from across the room while people keep walking in front of him—he rarely sees the entire image, never gets more than a few seconds, not enough to piece anything together. All he remembers is anger, fear, and frustration. And Steve had put up with all of that. Not once had he shown any of the aggravation that would have made Bucky leave, would have proven him right in thinking he was nothing but a burden, too dangerous to stay. He knows that if Steve had ever gotten angry, though, back then, Bucky would have lost the tenuous grip he has on the Soldier. And there would have been no coming back from that. 

But Steve still never seemed bothered by anything regarding Bucky. He’s utterly patient, completely complacent. Bucky’s never purposefully tried to rile him, too afraid it’ll bring out everything he’s hidden away, but sometimes he wants to. He wants Steve to acknowledge that Bucky’s been walking all over him and he’s been letting him do it. 

Bucky isn’t worth it. He knows Sam told him not to think that—the words about telling himself he deserves better are the only part of that conversation that stands out; the rest is muddled—but saying empty words to himself will do nothing if he doesn’t believe it. 

And he doesn’t want to believe he deserves Steve. 

But he wants to stay. 

Everything’s mixed up; every time he tries to follow one line of thought, decipher one string of emotion, it gets tangled with everything else. He can push away things he doesn’t want to think about, yes, but the things he does want in his head are tied too close together. He can’t separate the image of Steve’s smile from the knowledge that Steve would be better off if Bucky left. Can’t pull his guilt away from this thing he’s daring to call a sense of belonging. Can’t split up his past and his humanity. 

He’s been cheating. 

At least, he’s been doing something he shouldn’t. And he knows why he shouldn’t, in theory, but he still gives himself missions. 

If he can point out for himself a clear goal, something to aim for, it helps him to not focus on the listlessness he feels most days. If he can set parameters, know what constitutes success and failure, he achieves so much more than when he pushes himself with sheer force of will. And Bucky knows he should be striving to get away from that way of thinking, the mindset of ‘do this because it is your mission, failure is not an option,’ but it’s so much simpler, so much easier to get through the day, and isn’t that what he should be aiming for? For normal, everyday actions to actually feel normal? If making it his mission to have a conversation with entirely complete sentences, to find something funny, hell, to brush his damn teeth, enables him to do just that, why shouldn’t he? 

But they always feel like empty wins, knowing that he can only accomplish these things by falling back to old routines. It feels like he’s lying when he talks to someone and they don’t know he’s only doing it because he feels like he has to. It’s a hollowness, a void that he doesn’t know how to fill. 

And Steve, _fuck_ , it’s so much worse around Steve, because he’s there on those good days Bucky manages to pilot himself through but he’s also there on all the other days. He sees the turnaround, takes the brunt of it when Bucky has days on which he can cycle through inexplicable combinations of content, pissed, afraid, and despondent. On which he’s lost in head. Steve has to deal with it, and Bucky doesn’t know how he does, how he can stand it when Bucky will be talking and laughing but an hour later be shut up in his room, how they can fuck one night and the next morning he flinches if Steve touches him. 

(He’s only freaked out once during the actual act, and it’s one of his proudest achievements that they’d talked about it—actually, truly talked—to the point they can both laugh about Steve being punched off the bed.) 

He can remember being in love with Steve, so he knows what they have now is different. And not just in how he’s fucked up enough that sometimes he’s not even sure he can call it a relationship. It’s different because everything he feels is disturbed. Like someone’s taken his capacity for emotion and kneaded it into something labyrinthine, so anything he feels is muted, almost tired. Even those brief periods where he thinks he’s happy are tiring, like they’re a replica of someone else’s that he’s had to fight to pull up from inside him. He doesn’t feel anything as much as he could, except for anger, fear, suspicion, those things that have been with him so long that they’re easy They come easily to him and in a way, Bucky likes that because they’re so strikingly clear. Anger is vibrant, happiness is gray. 

Love is gray, too. Bucky knows he’s running in circles, finding so many reasons to tell Steve he’s sorry and that he shouldn’t have to put up with Bucky, despite hearing Steve’s voice so clearly in his head gently admonishing him and telling him it’s not true, but this is just another bullet on the list. He’s not as in love with Steve as he could be. Should be. Wants to be. 

And Steve doesn’t deserve that. What he has now is a memory of a relationship, something only halfway there. Bucky as he is now can't be whole, can’t be everything Steve wants, and even if Steve can’t see it, Bucky knows what they have is off-kilter, set askew by his damned inability to just be a normal human being who can love and laugh and live without this muted feeling, without the knowledge that he’s not fully there. He knows he loves Steve, but. 

But. 

It won’t ever be like it was before. 

Bucky hasn’t told Sam about that part, about wishing he could be in love like they used to be, but he’s told him about the not really being there, only being part of a person. Sam told him he needed to reset his idea of who he was, of who he was going to be, since he wasn’t the Bucky of the past anymore. He needs to recast himself, because he can’t set a goal of being 100% himself if he doesn’t know who he’s aiming for. He’ll just keep finding more and more reasons why he’s not there yet, more things to dislike about himself, and he won’t ever be able to consider himself recovered. He’d wear himself down completely, Sam had said, so why chase after something he’s unsure about when he could be working on the person he is right now, the one that belongs in this century. Make new memories, find more things he likes, and let recovery find its way to him, because constantly striving for perfection won’t make someone perfect, it’ll just make them keep chasing an idea they can’t ever reach. 

Natasha had actually told him something similar, though it came more from talking about her own experiences that just talking at him. She told him about being broken and remade, and how she’s still doing the same thing to herself now, remaking herself every time she has to take on a new name, a new persona. She told him she doesn’t think she can ever be entirely just herself anymore, that sometimes, just sometimes, memories get blurred and it takes her a moment to work out if it’s something she experienced as herself or someone she was pretending to be. She asked Bucky if he’d talked to Banner at all, and while Bucky likes him well enough and can see the parallel paths they walk of keeping part of themselves locked away, he’s just not willing to burden anyone else with his issues, though he doesn’t say that to Nat. 

It’s an uneasy contradiction, wanting to be rid of everything that’s wrong with him while still feeling as if it’s his burden to bear, his alone, something he deserves to suffer through and deal with on his own. Wanting to spend more time with the people he’s pretty sure can be considered his friends by this point while still wanting them to leave him alone. Being in love with Steve while still wanting to disappear. 

He’s been thinking about the plan he’d never followed through on. Leaving. Just walking away. And _staying_ away. As he was back then, the desire to go was fueled by volatility, paranoia, and self-loathing. And while those things still exist within him, they’re not overwhelming. He current thoughts of disappearing stem from his growing guilt and a desire to let everyone else, mostly Steve, get on with their lives. 

Bucky wonders if he could make it on his own.


	15. Dream

He could be better than this. 

Bucky knows this is a truth, that he’s been holding himself back from trying to get better. Sabotaging himself. 

But he’d been right. He can’t do this. 

It wasn’t a _stumble_ when he’d locked himself in his room, hyperventilating in a corner. When Steve forced the door open anyway when Bucky wouldn’t answer him. When Bucky screamed at him to get out and went to swing at him but couldn’t even manage to do that right and ended up slumped against Steve, crying for no damn reason. 

It wasn’t a damn stumble, it was a fucking relapse. A reversion so far back it couldn’t mean anything but that all that progress he’d been thinking he made was just some fragile illusion, a façade he’d erected to fool himself into thinking he could be anything beyond an empty persona directed by the Soldier. 

Thing is, Bucky still knows he could be better. He’d tasted normalcy, sampled what it was like to have a normal life, and façade or not, he’d been there. He’d been the one going through the motions, even he hadn’t been entirely in control of his mind. So he knows that it’s possible. That path is not shut off to him, not blocked by the same rubble he’d piled on the Soldier’s prison. 

But it wasn’t achievable, not for him, not as he was now. All that work, all that time spent on reaching that point…was he supposed to do it all over again? 

He _can’t_. He can’t pull himself that far, push himself up something to huge. If everything he’d worked through has been erased, then there’s no way he can get it back. He’s tired. He’s so damn tired of fighting through every single day with the fear of losing himself looming permanently over him, clouding his every movement. And now he’s back to hiding away, not talking for fear that his words will come out as jumbled as they used to, not letting anyone touch him for fear he’ll hurt them. 

How is he supposed to come back from this? He doesn’t want to climb that mountain again. He shouldn’t have to. By now he deserves better than stumbling through life straining for an idea just out of reach, an idea he was so close to once before and now has to slog his way towards for a second time. 

He can’t do it. 

He shouldn’t have to do it. 

He’s too tired to do it. 

He’s too tired to do much of anything. He wishes everyone could just see the real him, this torn up almost-person. They think him whole, see him as someone capable. They have expectations that he can’t reach, that he can only dream of reaching. It’s like they’ve conjured up some double of Bucky, one they want to be around, and nobody can see the real him, the one that’s just _lost_ in this jumble of memory and longing and desperation. Everything’s a mess. 

If nobody expected anything from him, he would never be disappointing anyone. If there was nobody around to remind him of what he could be, what he had been, he wouldn’t be trapped where he is. 

Unprompted, Bucky starts thinking about 1935 again, that first summer with Steve, back before anything happened and they were happy. Just happy to be with each other. Unworried. And he still wants it. He remembers what Sam told him about not striving for that old image, not trying to remake the past, but dammit, he wants that back. He doesn’t just want to have the memories, he wants to live like that, to be able to live like that again. 

Things aren’t like Steve said they’d be, like Sam said they could be. It’s like everyone else is on some higher plane of existence, and Bucky can only look up and dream of one day being like them. Of belonging. And maybe that’s really all it is, a dream. Because he’d tried; he’d fought for so long and so damn hard, only to crash down in failure. And it feels like everything he wanted, everything he wants, what he almost had, is slipping further away, too far for him to reach. Even before, he could grasp at reality, at normality, could feel enough of it to want to fight for it. 

Now, it’s like he can watch it disappear. 

Maybe he should chase after it that way, by disappearing with it. He could try and find himself without anyone around to set standards for him. Go out on his own where he’s not a danger or a burden to anyone. Because all of this, the stability, the friends, the quieting of his mind—how long could it have lasted anyway?


	16. Release

He’s afraid. 

He’s afraid because everything’s different, but nothing’s changed. 

He can feel himself panicking beneath the surface, bubbling and threatening to burn him if he doesn’t let it out, but he’s so terrified of what’ll happen when he does. He hopes that maybe, by now, the most he’d do is scream, hide away and cower, something that at the most would get him strange looks, but there’s always that chance. However long it’s been, however competent he feels he’s become at keeping that part of him tamped down, there’s always the chance. 

There are people everywhere. None of them are paying any attention to him, and it’s wrong. They don’t know who he is. He’s wearing gloves, has a hood on, but he feels so obvious. All these people just trusting that he’s not dangerous, that he’s just another person. 

Even he doesn’t have that much faith in himself. 

He will never be just another person. Leaving the tower has proved as much. He is not self-sufficient. Bucky thinks he’s probably known this all along, but the same part of his mind that had been urging him to leave had always assumed he could get by on his own. But it was clearer now: he’d lost that autonomy, the kind fueled by necessity, by the Soldier’s blank single-mindedness. 

It almost feels like he wants to laugh, though it could just be the sheer anxiety he’s fighting, because he’s gotten enough of himself back that he can’t do this alone anymore. All that time spent afraid of Steve and his words and his smile, of Sam and Natasha and how much they all _cared_ , afraid of caring about them too, thinking he was saving himself by running away and shutting himself off, and now he was gone. He’d done what he thought was best for all of them, and it’s only now he sees that he’s needed these people in his life for a while now. 

He knows he’s been getting… _better_ seems like the most appropriate word. Better at controlling himself, his words, his emotions, at seeming like a normal person. But he can still feel the danger inside him, danger and something else hollow and foreboding, something sinister in being unknowable. He can’t have been healing all this time when he knows what’s still inside him, could he? 

He’s a mess. He’s a mess and he can’t fix himself. Who the fuck was he kidding, thinking he could just disappear? They’ll come after him. They probably already are. Whether because they think he’s dangerous or that he won’t make it on his own, it doesn’t matter. Both are true. 

Bucky doesn’t want to go back, but he can already name something he felt in the tower that isn’t out here: security. He’d left the one place, the one _person_ best made to hold him, because Steve is the one person he’s most afraid of hurting. That’s an absolute truth: he loves Steve, and so much of what Bucky does is for Steve. He left for him, but he’s starting to think that maybe this desperation he feels, how he can’t stop wondering what Steve is thinking right now (does he know Bucky’s gone yet? Is he worried? Is he angry? Is he okay?), maybe it’s the same for Steve. Because he loves Bucky, too; that’s something Bucky’s starting to trust more and more, so what if leaving accomplished nothing but making Steve feel like he does right now. 

His mind is pulling him both ways, back to the security of what he knows, and out into the world of people who don’t know him. Both are painful, both could lead to something better than he has now. 

He could run. He could keep running for a long time. He knows how. 

He could go back. He could let himself be cared about. He’s still learning how to do that. 

He has a choice, bigger than anything he’s had to choose except for deciding to leave. Staying gone means he can only hurt himself and he can get away from all the expectations and prying eyes, but it means he’ll be alone, always running. Going back means he’ll have to keep fighting, keep healing, keep pushing even when he feels like shit, but it means being around people who want to help him, even if he’s still trying to figure out who he is. 

He has a choice. 

Steve finds him sitting on a park bench, and Bucky smiles.


	17. The Fall

Bucky’s had a lot to think about. It’s been a week since his foray into the public, and the experience had given him exposition, enough to add a few things to the list of truths. 

First, he is not at a point where he should be alone, at least not the unsupported, nobody else around sort of alone. He still has too many bad days, bad thoughts, bad ideas about himself. 

Second, he’s okay with this. It had taken him most of the week to come to that reckoning, because it’s so far removed from his black and white thinking of ‘okay’ and ‘not okay,’ not seeing how the two could possibly coexist. But the feeling had sprung up while he’d been stuck on the sidewalk, not knowing which way to turn, and he’d first started wrestling with it sitting on that bench, waiting. He’d chosen to go back, or at least let himself be taken back, even while knowing he was very much not the unbroken person he wanted to be. 

Third, all that time spent believing the worst in himself had been because of his friends. He doesn’t mean this in a bad way; he means that because he’d felt so overwhelmed by everyone’s ability to function under circumstances he couldn’t even begin to deal with, he’d wanted to get better. This whole time, watching the casual way they interacted, the smiles that came easily, how utterly comfortable they were in their own lives, their own bodies—there had been too many days his despairing jealousy (and he’s almost certain that’s what it was, what it still is; he’s trusting his emotions a lot more these days) had kept him down, threatened to have him slip under the heaps of trash in his head and let out the person he’d been trying to keep away from them. But his longing to be like them, to have the same simplicity in the day-to-day instead of his simmering hate, had forced him to stay above the line of truly lost. He’d been chasing their examples. Yes, he’d been thinking they had it easy and scorning how little they knew about what he was going through, but the more he’d tried to be like them, the more they’d learned about him. 

Steve had known this all along. Maybe they all had, but only Steve was there from the very beginning with all his questions and prodding and constant presence, all things Bucky had hated so much but couldn’t truly have started down his journey without. Speaking, choosing, growing comfortable around others, learning to deal with anxiety before he shattered, learning to _laugh_ , all of it had started with Steve’s pushing and gained momentum with Sam and Natasha’s pulling. 

He’s had tireless support this entire time, and he hasn’t been grateful. He’s been guilty, any thankfulness hidden by feeling like the burden nobody else saw him as. 

It’s a trust fall, to shut his eyes and let himself slip into faith, to grab hold of the hand Steve’s been offering since before Bucky even recognized him. 

Trust is hard. Bucky can’t remember ever feeling like he wholly trusted anyone or anything. Maybe back, before, the old Bucky had known it, but now, as himself…he doesn’t trust himself, and it’s too big a question for him to answer whether he needs to be able to trust himself before he can trust someone else. 

But Steve has always been there, and the more Bucky had been able to start trusting him, the larger his world became. He had someone else to focus on, something besides his own pain. 

But how much can Steve take before he gives up, lets go? How long before he finally gets tired, before everyone who’s ever helped him decides he isn’t worth it anymore. These are things that have been hounding him for months, but instead of vitriolic certainty, they now linger with apprehension, questions Bucky asks without wanting to know the answer. Without wanting an answer to exist but feeling as if that’s too much to hope for. 

But that’s just the thing…what is too much? He’s learned how to hope, how to want, and he wants his downfall not to be inevitable. And now that he’s stumbling uncertainly through the mire of whether it is or not, he can actually hope. He doesn’t have to have unbroken faith in himself to imagine not breaking.


	18. I Bet My Life

He tells Steve he’s not leaving. 

He’s surprised at first, maybe a little confused, but it takes him only a moment to know what Bucky’s really saying. 

“I can’t pick and choose which parts of the past I leave behind.” 

Steve hasn’t said anything. He’s trying not to react. He doesn’t know where Bucky’s going with this, but for once, Bucky does. 

“I hurt you.” 

“Bucky-” 

“No. I did. I will. I’m not who…I-I used to be, no matter what I remember. I’ll keep letting us down for a long time.” 

Steve’s jaw shifts, and Bucky knows he’s frustrated, wants to say that Bucky’s never let him down. 

“But you…you did…You’ve been through hell for me and I still f-feel like you…you’d do it all again.” It’s not something he ever wanted to believe, before, but he can’t deny it now. 

Steve looks back and forth between Bucky’s eyes before he speaks, almost a whisper: “You know I would.” 

“Mm.” Bucky nods, smiles a little. He does know. “You’re still him.” He’s still the guy Bucky would follow anywhere, the one he never dreamed of coming back to, the one he finally wants to stop running from. 

It’s a trust fall. 

It’s a little faith in himself, a little faith in Steve, and the rest in unknowable. 

He tells Steve he’s not leaving.

*****END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading. :) Come talk to me on tumblr at [fictionalfeather](http://fictionalfeather.tumblr.com/).


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